How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured - Page 3
Beyond Basics - Microformats
The annotations that we discussed up to now are very basic and would a
require minimum amount of work from newspapers, bloggers, and blogging platforms to deploy. The advantage of them is that they
are simple to implement but would deliver big bang for the buck. Yet, these are primitive ways to annotate content.
The next step is to use bottom-up technologies like microformats, which offers
a way to embed objects into HTML documents in a compact way.
Microformats have been around for a few years and have certainly caught the attention of some. Several major services are using microformats. For example, Flickr is using the geo microformat and headers to geotag photos. Eventful uses the hCal format to describe meta data for each event. Blogger pages contain hCards for each blogger. But the problem is that there needs to be more and better integration of microformats into the blogging platforms. For example, coming back to the Blogger hCard, right now, most of them are not useful because they do not require people to fill in information and just generate the card based on the login. This is more harmful than good as semantic tools can not take advatange of such cards and they do not look good to people either.
Similarly, there is not much support for geotagging photos and event microformats in the platforms. But even beyond the lack of support, the limitation of the current microformat specs is that they do not cover the basic range of things that people discuss on the web - books, music, movies, recipes, and restaurants are all noticibly absent (the existing hReview microformat does not have a way to express the type of the object or the attributes).
But it does look like with a bit of a push on both the community behind the microformat specs and blogging platforms we could see microformats becoming a major way of annotating information inside blog posts. This would be a welcomed development and would allow a large subset of the web - the blogosphere - to become quite structured.
Conclusion
The vision of the structured web is big and compelling and at the same time is hard to attain. At times, it is difficult to see how we can ever get there. But on some days we think that even if the web could be just a tiny bit more structured it would become so much more connected. And so in this post we considered a set of very basic bottom-up techniques that newspapers, bloggers, and blogging platforms can put in place to make the web more structured.
Putting meta information into page headers is easy and should be a must-do thing for everyone. Beyond that, providing information such as author, date, and location makes data that much more valuable. And if blogging platforms could also standardize on the key elements of the pages, crawlers and intelligent browsing tools could do a better job making sense of the content. Beyond that, microformats are the front runner in annotating the web with meta information about things, but they still need more pushing and effort.
What do you think about these basic structures? Are you going to fix up your blog after reading this post? What other things should we push to standardize on?
Comments
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Microformats rock! It's one of those things that you wonder why nobody thought of them sooner. I'm excited to see how the new API in FF3 will allow better exposure of microformats in the future.
A fundamental microformat is still missing: one to represent measurable physical quantities (i.e. Any Data Value!) into semantic HTML.
This would allow browsers/plugin and js scripts to search and collect data from various URLs (in any unit-of-measure) and proceed straight into processing and mashup tasks; no more scraping, nor Readme.txt to describe how to interpret the downloaded .csv file.
Some preliminary notes are on the microformats wiki, but nobody seems interested enough to get the discussion going and the 'hmeasure' thing out of the Draft-state limbo.
Regarding the standardising of blogging templates, there has been some excellent research/analysis done on that front to see if there are any significant numbers of common objects in HTML.
After a bunch of folk provided some excellent data, Google thought they'd step in and provide a small billion document set for comparison.
You can find their work and links to others on at Google's Web Authoring Statistics.
Bravo - we'll get to that semantic web...even if we wear are fingers down with the extra typing!
For the structure for blog posts, I recommend following the microformat hAtom:
http://microformats.org/wiki/hatom
Excellent post. Excellent subject. But I do not see any mention of the "anti-structure" forces at work.
I was a Joost pre-beta tester ONLY because of their ( now retracted ) promise of annotated television. Some secret meeting occurred at Joost and the decision was made to abandon RDF and/or Microformat markup for the videos. No explanation. Nothing.
Also, I want to bring to your attention the recent killing off the WC3's plan to have plain mark-up in HTML 5 for videos by Adobe:
http://www.digitalcitizen.info/2007/12/30/ogg-theoravorbis-as-default-for-video-scuttled-in-html5-spec-who-benefits/
Ogg Theora isn't that great of a file format, but it shows that our altruistic attempts at making a "Read Write Web" will be stopped by very greedy, close minded people.
rather than using a class of post for the post container. Wouldn't it make more sense to use a class of hEntry and go with the hAtom microformat?
Microformats, standarized blogging templates, and even HTML meta tags are all great ways of exposing additional "structured" information in web pages.
Additionally, services like Orchestr8's AlchemyGrid ( http://grid.orch8.net/extractions/grab ) make it easy to 'apply semantic structure' to existing websites, exposing their data to semantic webapps, mashups, and other stuff.
Really useful article. Web structuring is more important as it may help site to get good rank in search engine.
Looks like this page is missing the keyword, date, and location info ;)
I agree; this is a great aritcle. I think that having a more structured web will not just help search, but will help usability as more and more people are getting away from the alrge-screened terminals for accessing the web. Having the abiltiy to search distinctly, and then manage what you've found seems to be a ripe recipie for making mobile and vertical applications of the web grow healthier.
Of course, when semantics are entered into the equasion, advertising can become much more targeted, and trends are much easier to notice across users. Privacy folks could have a ball with this kind of info. And that's the cost of being more organized, more people can find ya.
Sounds great, but be carefull how much weight you give this meta data. If maybe there was someway the page author (or blog template for that matter) can have a very small blue square in the upper right most part of the page that when clicked allowed the user to thumb up or down the authored meta data as well as supplement.
This can allow you to give more weight to top down meta based on qty of thumbs while allowing a community to validate it from the bottom up. Best of both worlds?
@LucaPost:
Agree on your point about measures, discussion does seem to have stagnated on this. I've looked into the hRecipe spec and that touches on the need to mark up quantities. I see some issues with the abbr pattern in that parsers would have to know the spelling and misseplling of measure units in order to convert them.
Also there are a wide range of units out there and marking all of them up in a standard way is a challenge and I think this is why not much is going on here. I don't think it's apathy from the very small microformat development community, more a case of the difficulties involved with quanity units.
Please feel free to join in on the mailing lists.
Cheers
Lee
yep, just few of these steps have a great impact on your SERP's.
In terms of location (geotagging) metadata elements or microformat tags are all very well and good--if you're a machine. They aren't generally visible to humans who may otherwise miss the fact that location-specific information is associated with a particular blog post/ photo/ feed etc. That's why I propose a web "standard" Geotag Icon to add visual identification to geotagged content:
http://www.bioneural.net/2008/02/21/a-web-standard-icon-for-geotagging/
If more people see other people tagging their content ("What's that icon?"), more people will start tagging their own content.
Wordpress.com’s semantic tools such as categories, tags, urls for individual posts, author’s name generated automatically to each post, dates per post, seem to mimic the function of metatags and are Search Engine friendly. As well, when my del.icio.us tags and wordpress.com’s tags and categories are syncronized, I think this performs a similar role to metatagging. To make it even more elegant, del.icio.us offers suggestions for popular tags used by other del.icio.us users on posts and sites that have already been entered into their database. For example, del.cio.us suggests these tags for Alex Iskold’s useful post on structuring the Internet through metatagging: Blog, blogging, code, CSS, Design, development, findability, folksonomy, howto, HTML, marketing, metadata, readwriteweb, semantic, semantic_web, semantics, semanticweb, tag, tags, tips, trends, visualization, web, web3.0, webdesign, XHTML, markup, Internet, microformats.
After reviewing the ReadWriteWeb article on structuring the Internet, I looked up the New York Times metatags offered as a best practice model by ReadWriteWeb and attempted to adapt them to my own Speechless blog. Wordpress quickly eliminated my outlaw codes leaving no trace.
On my wishlist for metatags or semantic web structure would be basic webliographic information for serious content users who want to attribute ideas and content.
I read your informative, up-to-date, well-researched blog regularly, often experimenting with ideas, technology and tools that you recommend.
Iskold, Alex. 2008. “How YOU Can Make the Web More Structured.” >> ReadWriteWeb. Uploaded. January 30, 2008 10:48 PM. Accessed February 2008.
Really useful, thanks!
Great post...excellent info..I learn something new today!
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