I know I haven’t written for a while, but I found a certain piece of news about a new blog for Ahmedi Nejad the Iranian president. It seems that the blog was announced in official news agencies. Now I must admit that the Iranian blog movement had always fascinated me. What amazes me is how […]
It seems that as Nader got cured from his Draft-but-not-publish syndrome, I caught it up. I discovered that my latest post was more than a month ago, and what’s worse, it was about IE7 :) Now, since then I wrote many drafts for posts, about several topics: Google Arabic translation, how excited I am about […]
A couple of weeks ago, we got a very interesting email from the “Contact Us” in Jordan Planet site:
Topic : RSS Feed issue with IE7
Message : I’m a Program Manager for RSS on the Internet Explorer team. I’m contacting you because we have received a report that your website’s RSS feed is not compatible with […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
First I thought I was the only one obsessed with Jordan Planet, and check the site from his mobile while away from a PC. Then I learned that Jameed tries to check it from his mobile during his long hours in the lab, and last week, Laith told me that he checks RSS feeds from […]
I started a thread in Jordan Planet forum (click to follow) about the predictions of 2006 for Jordan Planet, please share your thoughts if you have any.
Jordan will be hosting the second edition of the World Culture Forum next week, from 4th-7th of December. The event’s program and speakers list is extraordinary, which attracted me to the event since I knew about it, and so I registered to attend it. The speaker list is so full of key and known speakers, […]
I wasn’t able to blog or access the internet much while I was in Tunis, so I will start in the next days blogging about the event, and the last days.
As soon as I was in the ICT4ALL Exhibition, I started to look for the societies and people I know. I met Ethan who introduced […]