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Thursday, 1 June 2006

Building openness in - Pingerati and Microformat search

Now we've announced Pingerati and Microformat search, I get a chance to reflect on what has been keeping me busy for the last month, and behind the hiatus in my writing here. I have been building a parallel infrastructure to our Blog indexing, focused on Microformats instead.

Microformats are a way of expressing common kinds of things we refer to online in HTML, such as people, places events and reviews. They are built on layers of open standards, and meant to re-use and converge existing ideas, not make up new ones out of thin air.

When Dave and I were building up Technorati, we were able to do so because of the underlying openness of the web environment - the infrastructure of the net itself, and the open source servers, databases and parsers we connect together to make the data flow.

We also built on a culture of openness that owes a lot to Dave Winer - the openly accessible list of updated blogs gave a place to start in finding blogs to index, and by feeding back links to bloggers we encouraged cross-blog conversations.

When we added tags to blogs we used the rel-tag microformat in conjunction with existing category conventions, and made sure the links were not proprietary, but under authors' control. Again, helping people make connections through open standards.
By being open, we let everyone's world grow.

Although we are seeing more Microformats in blogs every day, we know that they make sense in other places too, and we need a way to encourage people to experiment with them, and find how they can add value to the world. Indexing them and reflecting them back to writers, but building an open data flow that others can tap in enables much more.

So, for the last couple of weeks, I've been working on Pingerati, which is a way to route Microformats around. If you have pages with data to share, you can ping it. If you want to find who has Microformats, it will ping you. The protocol is as simple as it could be, and it should enable the kind of positive sum gains I was talking about yesterday.


Technorati Tags: blogs, emergence, HTML, meme, microformat, microformats, search, tags, technorati, Web 2.0℠

Posted by Kevin Marks at 07:43

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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