How about calendar events—in the feed or in the content?
If it’s just generated via template, why not both? Or is this where the law intends I should be conservative?
Is anyone working on a Markdown of microcontent?
These are some great questions about microcontent. First, they should check out what Bob Wyman is doing with structuredblogging.org. Next, check out what we're doing at reger.com with datablogging.
Here's how the two fit together: we have a user interface and application that allows users to create ad-hoc custom log types. From the questions, users can create their own calendar structures or review structures. They can then create log entries and publish that data to their blog, rss feed, advanced searches, graphs, etc.
Now, what Bob Wyman is putting together is a language to share log types between tools. We have sharing within our tool, but not outside. So Bob has adopted XML Schema to share log types. That's what structuredblogging.org is about. Bob is also creating a way for that microcontent to be published beside a web entry via XML. Essentially hiding XML inside of javascript tags. Good approach.
In the coming weeks reger.com will be supporting Bob's XML Schema method for sharing log types. When a user creates a custom log type, like say a Space Calendar log type, we'll auto-generate the XML Schema to describe that microcontent. We'll also help them publish/share that XML Schema so that bloggers on other systems can take part in their log type. Communities should grow around custom log types. And a market for log types will develop... "Space Calendar is good, but our Super Space Calendar is the da bomb dawg!"
And we'll be posting that Space Calendar, or whatever, content in the post itself via Bob Wyman's methodology.
At the same time, we'll still be publishing microcontent via rss, hosting graphs, saved searches, etc. So the answer, to me, is that the microcontent should, at least for now, be published in both places... with the post and with the rss. We're in the early days of this microcontent thing and we need to adopt/try as many ways of sharing the data as we can so that we gain toolmaker support and applications can be built to leverage the data that users collect.
As for the law, the hope is that XML Schema and its supporting validation implementations help the issue. We'll see.
SoCon08