intertwingly

It’s just data

The Problem with Metadata

David Weinberger: Hess gas station, Allston, Massachusetts

LOL! I think Cory Doctorow had something to say about this...

Update: even funnier: hyperorg's trackback blew up processing this...


Prestidigitation

Matt Croydon: So what else do you have up your sleeve, Sam?

The way to find it is to take my simple challenge. Try it on the small sample I identified. Then we'll talk...


What does a Trackback URI identify?

Mark Baker: ...I note that Paul, Ben, and Mena had written about what could be returned, which is bang on from my POV

OK, I've implemented basically that functionallity, with a few minor changes. For example, I want to continue to support old-style trackback requests which unfortunately were based on HTTP GET. But the end result is that now a GET the URI does what you would expect.


RSS Trackback module

Abe Fetig: So, is anybody using the RSS Trackback module yet?

I am now. Generally I wait until somebody finds a compelling use case for a feature, and you certainly have a humdinger. I kinda suspect that this is the type of thing that Jon Udell would like to see. ;-)


Value of Uniform Interfaces

The first usage of RSS was to flow data from news producer to portals.  Over time, this evolved into a flow from weblog servers to aggregators.

One of the first truly novel uses of RSS is as a weblog archive format.  In the case of Radio, this required the addition of some tool specific elements, but that is not a problem as RSS 2.0 is extensible through namespaces.  Now, we have a flow from weblog servers to weblog servers.

With the SOAP interface to the RSS validator, we have RSS (with some optional wrapper elements) flowing from weblog software to a validator.  Dave already demonstrated that weblog archives validate as RSS.  This is the beginnings of the network effects that can be possible if common exchange formats are adopted - no new validator needed to be written.

I have suggested that Wouldn't It Be Nice If a converged pingback / trackback mechanism were to focus on a simple POSTing of an RSS fragment (i.e., with perhaps some of the unnecessary RSS wrapper elements removed).  If such a suggestion were adopted, I would gladly modify the existing RSS validator to be able to validate such requests.

At the moment, there is a schism between the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API.  These both may have their place, but I would like to suggest that weblogging software consider support of the dramatically simpler RESTLog API, possibly in addition to one or both of the above.

Why do I say it is dramatically simpler?  Let's propose a challenge.  In the spirit of the BDG to SOAP 1.1 which exposed all of the machinery of SOAP, I'd like to request that proponents of either the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API produce a similar BDG for their protocols, and would like to request that it include the first item from the Radio Weblog Post Module example.  I'll start by providing a sample for RESTLogPost.

Any takers?


Another dead end?

Phil Ringnalda calls me a dead end because I didn't implement the Retrieving TrackBack Pings API.

Harumpf. We can't have that now, can we?

OK, so without further ado, I think I implemented this API correctly (at a cost of three lines of code and a new template). Here's the list of trackback pings to the "Trackback Threading" blog entry. But the threads still don't seem to be connecting...

What did I do wrong?