John Breslin has done two fine posts on structure in blogs over at the IIA Blog. The first is basically about Structured Blogging (SB) and the second about semantic blogging. As many people know, the SB plug-ins for WordPress and MT were released to a mainly positive response way back in Dec 2005. I made much use of them in the early months and was a big fan from an end-user perspective. Unfortunately, due to lack of further funding they were not able to keep up with WordPress developments.
At the time, there were some naysayers who were convinced that the addition of structure to blog posts would never take off due to the extra work involved. In the case of SB, I do think they had a point from an implementation perspective. The plug-in was intrusive, messed with your WordPress install and in some cases required tons of data input to do a blog post.
Once I started looking under the hood and saw that SB was partially built on these things called microformats, I moved my focus there and realised that there was much more flexibility available to me than I had thought. I saw that people were confusing the idea of structure in blog posts with one clunky implementation. If a huge proportion of bloggers are willing to add tags or insert flickr markup in the blog posts, they are hardly going to balk at adding a few minor pieces of meta data to an event or review. For example, you can still say "I think this movie is da bomb" but if you also add 5 stars, suddenly both humans and machines know what you mean!
Whilst John comes from the big S Semantic world and I'm firmly embedded in the microformats world, many of the aims are similar and I'm convinced that both offer the potential for great new services for web users. The creation of structured content is one thing, but doing useful stuff with it is far more interesting to me. And surely that's what it is all about, not philosophical arguments. My sense is that John takes this view too.
This SemWeb versus SynWeb 'argument' is something that intrigues me. I'd see myself also as coming from the small 's' side of things but more and more the mysteries of the Semantic Web are being revealed to me! While I still can't quite get my head around RDF/OWL, GRDDL, SPARQL, etc, I'm begginning to understand that there isn't as much of a chasm as I thought there was.
A podcast I'd recommend listening to is the one Paul Walsh of Segala did with Talis Talk. Paul feels that their Content Labelling initiative is one of the first practical implementations of the Semantic Web. But one part of the interview worried me - while he didn't quite diss microformats, in fact he said "they're fantastic and solve real problems", he added what I'd consider an alarming proviso - "but they're not in line with standards, it's not standardised".
I must ask him more about his views in London next week.
The "standards" problem is actually why microformats have taken off. Rather than spending years in committee, they just thought "well what works now?" and went and specced it and got community agreement and ran with it. As a hardcore pragmatist rather than theorist, that's why they are so appealing to me.
Take RDFa for example - a perfectly fine idea and approach. But it requires XHTML2 which isn't finished yet and probably won't see browser support for years after that. I see some mention of "should support XHTML1" in the spec rather than "built for now".
Ditto CSS3.
Standards are great and I'm all for them where appropriate (e.g. in the area Segala are working) but when the snails pace of the standards process is blocking innovation, I'll always go with the guys who have a solution now.
As I said tho, everyone agrees on the problem and you can be guaranteed that any gaps between approaches will be filled by tools. Danny Ayers is a must read in this area as he sees the benefits of both approaches.
And as for Paul's comment on Content Labelling being the first practical implementation of the Semantic web, I'm sure there are plenty of SemWeb people who might take issue with that.
Revyu, a competitor of ours, looks pretty practical to me and there is lots of SPARQL and RDF in there.
Annnndddd, the RDF/OWL/GRDDL/SPARQL thing is probably one of the reasons that SemWeb isn't gaining traction quickly.
I'm not dissing what they do, I'm dissing the language.
How many people on the street know what Ontology means? Ye know, I keep having to look it up. But even my Da understands what tagging is.
Years of people ignoring RDF and then Flickr comes along with "machine tags " and the tech community goes wild!
I think John is very good at demystifying a lot of the SemWeb stuff - they need more people like him in that community.
The W3C will eventually come out of the cooking pot when its ready (via stds bodies etc..) and 'hopefully' the reality of the web can just slap it in and it works...
Flickr, del.ico.us and the like took off because user generated 'tags' and folksonomy from a pratical aspect "just works".
The ontology and classifation systems (think librarys) are great but don't work 4 the masses. UGC (user generated contect) is becoming the norm and the classification aspect just has 2 play catch-up.
Tags (and whatever then mean 2 u, with everyone having their own idea) are here 2 stay.
So the geek (lots of db knowledge) in me wants the RDF/OWL and all that semantic good classification stuff. Reality is currently taking a different step.
Lal
There seems to be a lot of negative feeling towards the W3C out there. I've never been part of that world so I don't know the details behind it but I've seen some pretty harsh things written about their relevance in a web which some think they are not able to keep up with.