Year: 2005

I don’t work for Google, therefore I am exempt from the pledge of “Do no evil” and do evil. Daily if I can.

I don’t smoke, fool around with other people’s husbands (or wives, dogs, or horses for that matter); nor do I do drugs, and I drink in moderation. I don’t run old people down in the streets, nor steal candy from children. I pay taxes, stop at red lights, and rarely go over the speed limit. There isn’t much of a chance for evil doing in my day to day living, so I have to exercise my evil doings online. Luckily, there’s much opportunity for evil doings online.

Take my metadata interest. I’ve been a metadata pusher for years now, even before Google made its noble sounding pronouncement. The only thing is, I’ve been able to quietly go about my evil doing because no one knew it for what it is. Yesterday, though, Greg Yardley recognized what I, and others, have been doing and has sounded a clarion call of warning:

“Profiting off user-generated content is Web 2.0 colonialism.”* That sums up how I feel about the much-praised (and widely backed) Structured Blogging initiative, which makes it easy for bloggers to use microformats to mark-up specific genres of blog posts – reviews, classified listings, and so on. Microformats make blog posts machine-readable, which in turn allow them to be used by applications. Jeff Clavier sees Structured Blogging “eventually pushing blogging into richer types of applications – and enabling new types of aggregation.” Indeed – if adopted, it will. Which is what irks me.

What irks Mr. Yardley? The fact that providing metadata will enable organizations to profit from the metadata. More, to do so without his being recompensed:

But I really don’t want to be placed in a position where I get nothing for my small part in someone else’s eight-digit payday. I don’t want to come across like too much of a tool, but if I’m going to structure my content, I need better ways to control its commercial use.

And thus the evil efforts of those people like me are exposed. I lay before you now: a cyber thief; a stealer of data; no, a pusher if you will — trying to lure you all into the power of Meta.

Pssst. You wanna buy a dream. This is a class A dream.

I dunno. I don’t have any money.

You can’t buy this dream with money.

Well then, what do you want for your dream?

I want your metadata.

My metadata?

Yes, when you publish online, just insert this subliminal message into your page and you’ll have bought a piece of the dream.

But that means I’ll have to do a little extra work.

Yes, but isn’t it worth it, for dreams?

Dreams of what?

The Semantic Web

*gasp of horror, sound of footsteps running away*

There I am, being evil again. As Stow(e) Boyd writes, this is a kinder, gentler blogosphere, and my response to Mr. Yardley is neither kind, nor particularly gentle; especially when you consider that he expresses the concerns that others share. So let me put aside my essential evilness for a moment, and see if I can’t get in touch with my inner Mr. Rogers.

I notice that Greg and Stowe both have Technorati Tags at the bottom of their posts. Stowe must do so because he believes in the messy semantic web; Greg specifically mentions why he does, and that’s because Technorati gives him traffic. He also considers that the traffic from Google compensates him for Google exploiting his published material.

Oddly enough, both instances of traffic generation result from semantic web activity, though neither is particularly precise. For instance, I’m sure that Greg has received many visitors from Google for accidental search results; where a happenstance convergence of words from many posts meet some person’s odd, or not, search request. I imagine, also, that he’s received visitors from Technorati for publishing content under the tag name of “General”. But then, haven’t we all?

Is it a case, then, that when we get traffic in error, we should charge both Google and Technorati for using our bandwidth? Or is the important aspect of the exchange the traffic, regardless of accuracy?

You see, that’s where my evilness truly reaches inspired heights: I want to lessen the traffic that both Stowe and Greg get. Yes, I confess–this is my ultimate goal: to steal hits from webloggers.

By attaching more precise and detailed metadata to their posts, and by convincing search engines to become less enamored of their algorithms (or their horribly misbegotten ideas of centralized metadata stores), I hope to decrease the accidental traffic that both Stowe and Greg get.

But, you say, doesn’t this mean that ultimately Stowe and Greg will get visits that are based on true interest in a specific topic? And couldn’t they, in the end, actually get more traffic because of an increased exposure to the true meaning of what it is they are writing? After all, if Stowe writes on an event and marks it with microformats or structured blogging or even RDF, and if Google or Yahoo or MSN eventually catch on and grab this information, when a person enters a request for information on event into a search engine, wouldn’t Stowe’s entry pop up? Now, this match-up occurs only if the person’s search request happens to match the words that Stowe uses, and Stowe’s page rank is high enough to push other entries down that may, or may not, also be about the event.

True, I say.

But then, you say, isn’t this a good thing?

True, I say.

But then, you ponder, where is the evil?

Ah, I reply, with a smile that exposes far more teeth than is normal: Google and Yahoo and MSN and other companies that aggregate this data make money from the results. And, I smirk, we all know that money is the root of all evil. After all, only the homeless are true saints.

But, but, but, you sputter–they make money now, and for a lot less accuracy!

That’s the kicker, I cackle gleefully! Because now the search results are authentic! Authentic is good, I cry, and I only do evil!

So, you murmer–ears twitched, eyebrows furrowed–you’re exchanging authentic for accurate, and by doing this, you’re therefore turning good into evil?

Precisely!

You look perplexed, you look confused and then you say: I’m sorry, but I don’t see the evil in what you’re doing.

I lose my smile, my shoulders slump, my butt droops, and my cat cries. Saddened by your loss of comprehension at my Plan, I can only shake my head and wonder how a woman can continue to do evil when those around her just don’t get it.

For all that people are saying 2006 is going to be the year of this or that, I think that 2006 is going to be the year of metadata, and as such, we’re about to see some of the bloodiest battles in blogging. She who controls the metadata rules the world, and if the sly hints and nay saying I’m reading online are but a tip of the iceberg, what isn’t visible would make the US Democrats and Republicans blanch and give fervent thanks that though they may be politicians, at least they aren’t, thank (God | politically correct non-sectarian object of choice), in the metadata business.

The Structured Blogging Initiative made its announcement yesterday, with a rollout of Structured Blogging plugins for WordPress and Movable Type. I’ve been playing around with these in order to create OutputThis and you can see my test weblogs based in WordPress (and here), Blogger Blogspot weblog and Movable Type. I installed the WordPress plugin in the Testing 2 weblog, and have been playing around with the different types of SB types, such as reviews, lists, and so on.

First a disclaimer: as of this morning I no longer work for Broadband Mechanics. I will be working on OutputThis, adding new functionality and making any fixes to make it a true 1.0 production system; however, I am doing so as a volunteer.

To reassure folks, I am not going to starve by making this move, and no, there is no acrimonious relationship between me and the Broadband folks. But I did find myself constrained in what I wanted to write to Burningbird, what I felt should be written; worried that because of my relationship with Broadband, I could be hurting that company with what I wrote. Now, though I won’t divulge any confidences I received during my tenure with the company, I feel anything that’s out in the ‘public domain’ so to speak, is fair game.

The plugins that Phil, Kimbro, Marc, and Chad provided are some fairly sophisticated bits of coding, and add a rather impressive set of editing interfaces to Movable Type and WordPress. I thought the use of XML templates, or Micro Content Descriptors(MCD) in order to drop in a new plugin interface to be both open and clever. In addition the code is open source (GPL), and can even be incorporated into other tools by pulling out the bits and pieces you want.

I’ve long thought of extending my own RDF/XML metadata generation through the use of templates that can be used to generate the content. Though we differ in how we provide the metadata–my system provides the metadata as pure RDF/XML when you attache an ‘/rdf/’ to any of my posts, while SB is embedded–this approach of providing format descriptions is very adaptable.

Will I alter the SB WordPress plugin to work with Wordform (my fork of WordPress)? No, but that’s because I’ve chosen a different direction in how I work with metadata. In the end, with the help of Danny Ayers, RDF/XML can be pulled from the SB effort, which means none of our stuff is incompatible.

As for the criticisms, all were valid but there’s a couple I want to specifically address.

Niall Kennedy mentioned during the presentation that the generated XML/XHTML/RSS didn’t validate. Good point, comparable to all those folks who said that Technorati’s performance sucked, and the results were unreliable. At the time of highest criticism of Technorati, Dave Sifry said, “We will fix it”. Yesterday, Marc Canter and the SB team responded with, “We will fix it.” Isn’t it nice to know both organizations are willing to acknowledge user concern about application problems with a willingness to repair them? Compare this with Google, whose only response to user exclamations of, “It’s broke!” is .

(To hear or see the response, you have to wear magic Google filters in order to pull it out of the aether. I’m thinking of selling mine on eBay, but then you’d have to have a filter to see the filter offered for sale. It’s very tough to make a buck nowadays. What’s a girl to do to earn money for the holidays?)

Stowe Boyd wrote:

My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn’t like some of the consequences — such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on — but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging…

I am not sure who is benefited if everyone falling into line and adopting consistent standards for the structure of blog posts. Perhaps companies like PubSub — one of the driving force behind all this — who would like to be able to sort out all the blog posts about hotels, gadgets, and wine out there, and aggregate the results in some algorithmic fashion, and then make money from the resulting ratings and reviews. But I am not sure that it would be a better world for bloggers, or even blog readers.

So I favor the microformat approach, which is messy, puts more of a burden on the blogger, and will require a host of tools to be built to make it all work. But microformats will work blot tom-up — tiny little tagged bits of information buried in the blog posts — as opposed to structurally. And I am betting — as always — on bottom-up.

My first reaction was to say that Stow Boyd wouldn’t be able to find a leafy, green vegetable in a field of lettuce, but that wouldn’t be civil and god knows, we all need to be civil.

So instead what I’ll say is that microformats, which are adding tags to existing elements such as links, and Structured Blogging are not an either/or; same as neither is incompatible with my own RDF efforts. All efforts are bottom up; all efforts are top down; all support a semantic web because at some point, someone has to make a decision to attach a bit of metadata to a chunk of web space. How you do so is irrelevant.

I can easily create SB structured content from microformatted data, and generate microformatted data from SB content, and RDF/XML from both. Piece. Of. Cake.

As for Boyd’s rather unsubtle dig at so-called hidden agendas and why is PubSub doing this et al–might as well as why Technorati just started Explore if not to bite itself a piece of that richly tasting, and potentially fruity, semantic web pie.

Four years ago, the name of the game was weblogging; three years ago it was syndication; last year was search engines and this year, podcasting; next year it will be metadata. Companies will fuss and fidget and claim to be first or best, or that they’re only operating in the best interests of us (with an implication that other companies are not). We know better, but we don’t mind because the more dirt they dish up on each other, the more flowers the rest of us can plant.