Since I learned about Google Local now covering in Amman, I started to look and check places. It is very semilar to Google Earth, except that I didn’t really get to use Google Earth since there is no Linux version of it. Anyhow I compiled a list of buildings, sights, and places in Amman, with […]
As soon as I read the recent google post about their Local service, I rushed to try it. with so much ease, I found Amman fully covered in detail, while it did not before. Google had updated their Google Local service with the most recent images, and detail level, as the application Google Earth. Now […]
Last time I met him was in Riyadh where we spend some really good time, he took me around the city, I had mansaf with him, and so on. Weeks before it he came to Dammam, where he showed me around the city that I was new to. I didn’t see him since then. A […]
This piece of news made me really happy. Google Talk have “Open federation” now with the XMPP open standard. This means, that Gmail users will be able to talk to millions of people on Jabber servers all over the world. Jabber protocol is used by many to provide Instant messenging service for small groups, companies, […]
First, Visit this. Now this had been around for some time, some of you may had seen it. Problem is that a number of JP bloggers use software or service that does not support categorization (Yes, I am talking about Blogger). Some of the tags you see in that page are only used by one […]
Category: Tool / service
I was introduced to Structured Blogging by a blog post by my friend Basem a couple of days ago. First I didn’t really realize what it is. But when I installed the Wordpress Plugin and listened to 2 wonderful interviews with Salim Ismail of PubSub (Interview1, Interview2) I realized that it is the next big thing.
Now, we see all kinds of posts in the blogging world.. People use blogs to talk about their day, their opinion or review movies, books, websites and so, to announce events, jobs, or things to sell, give lists, provide audio or video files and so on. Problem is that such information is getting harder to find. One should be a regular blog reader to know about things when they happen. For example, last year I bought a Digital Camera, and a Linksys router through an announcement in Natasha’s blog, and I only knew about it because I read her blog.
Structured Blogging comes in part to solve this problem using microcontent. What does it offer, is the possibility for you to have your blog post, in a nice readable way, while providing information in machine readable format, that allow applications or other services to know “What” is this post about. For example, if you had watched the movie “Transporter 2″ and wanted to say that it sucked, you can give it a rating of 2 stars out of 5, and it will appear in a nice way in your blog (same way the Overall Rating above says that this site is 5 stars). And at the same time, an XML tag for your post, will tell that you gave the rating 2 stars for the movie, and there is another Tag that tells which movie are we exactly talking about, with even an automatic movie poster grabbing, and auto-filling of information from IMDB.
Now the fun part is how this information can be used. You could use a service or an application to search for movie reviews that gave the movie 3 stars or less, to see what was it that people didn’t like about the movie. Or could have an overall rating of the movie from the “Aggregated” ratings of the movie. What could be done is only limited by imagination from now on, as once “what is this blog post about” is clear, programs and services could be build to do whatever. You can know what are the events in Amman between 1-25 Jan, see what is the food rating of Wild Jordan, and so on.
Currently there are plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type, those plugins are made as a prove of concept. What is hoped for, is for blog service providers and software vendors to embrace the concept to allow for a more usable web.
PS. This post was made using the Structured Blogging plugin for Wordpress.
Apple just announced the MacBook Pro Laptop. It is built with the Intel Dual Core processor. Noe regardless of what’s inside, no one can make a laptop that is as sexy as this one. Now I need to read more about it, to know what’s really the deal with it. To know if existing Mac […]
Since my last review of the Arabic blog services 2 months ago, a number of changes happened in those services, as well, Maktoob introduced their MaktoobBlog service. I wanted to revisit the the blog services, and take a look at maktoob’s offering. I will start with Jeeran and Maktoobblogs, as for Albawaba Blogs, I know […]
In this site you can get a company name and idea for your next Web 2.o business. All you have to do is to refresh the page if you don’t like what it gave you (Refresh!! how Web 1.0 is this !). What is scary is that most of those terms and ideas made sense […]
Since Ahmad first emailed me along with other bloggers announcing what could be called an early test launch of toot, and requesting opinions and feedback, I wanted to write about it, and review it, but soon after, it was taken offline, for further improvements and a couple of days ago, it was up again, but […]