All your bases belong to google

This entry by Greg at Blogdigger titled Someone set up us The Bomb is excellent. I'd honestly hadn't really looked into Google base because the idea of marking up my data just for Google gives me the creeps, but the angle gives me a even creeper feeling.

In an effort to push things in the proper direction, a small group of individuals and companies began working on ways to structure information, in an attempt to prevent SDL (Semantic Data Loss) and create better search in the process. The history here goes back quite a bit, so I'll skip to the end, which is often called datablogging, microformats and/or structured blogging, all of which attempt to make the process of capturing the meaning of content easier both for the producer and the consumer. Things were moving along nicely in that direction; Google Base, however sends a proverbial “Make your time” to all those services, since Google Base essentially allows content producers to explicitly tell Google what all those little bits of data mean and how to interpret them.

Greg is right, but this is the dilemma. Google is offering a solution to put large amounts of structured data online while Databloggling hasnt gone that far and Microformats for as much I love them are still a second thought when blogging. I mean I'm a xml guy and I usually write the text, add the basic links, etc then some tags and maybe trackbacks. The adding of microformats usually comes afterwards, imagine what most people do.

We really need to start adding microformats to the Blogging applications, and soon.

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Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io