There are currently two main ways of producing microcontent. One is using a desktop blogging client and uploading the content directly to your weblog, followed by pinging a number of aggregators, which spider your content and add it to their index. The second is using external sites (eg Flickr, del.icio.us) to format and store your content, then either posting it back to your weblog from there or producing a feed that can be aggregated back into your own page.
Steve Mallett (datalibre) seems to be in favour of the former, where everything is hosted on your own site. Marc Canter (ourmedia, peopleaggregator) seems to be in favour of the latter, where you add your content to various distributed communities and use your own page as a ('digital lifestyle') aggregator (though confusingly Eric Sigler's PeopleAggregator diagram seems to lead more towards the datalibre style of publishing).
I started off making RVW as an extension to RSS/Atom feeds, with the idea that sites like AllConsuming and Technorati would spider everyone's sites and pick up the pre-formatted reviews. The problems with that are that a) that's a lot of spidering, at least while you aren't able to directly ping the aggregating sites with your formatted reviews, and b) most blogging tools weren't well suited to storing all kinds of metadata.
However, I also made a review formatting tool that posted a finished review to a) your weblog and b) a central aggregator site where other people could browse everyone's reviews and subscribe to particular categories. Even later, a newer version of this tool also posted reviews to del.icio.us, from where you can aggregate the list of reviews back into your own site, rather than storing them there yourself.
Personally, I think that storing microcontent on various specialised sites and aggregating the data on your own page is the best approach at the moment, based on the limitations of current blogging tools and pinging and spidering arrangements, though this could easily change in the future. Just make sure you don't store any content in a system that doesn't let you export it back out again. For constantly changing data like FOAF, however, over which you need to retain control, it makes sense to store the file locally and have others reference it when needed.
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I think you're right, but I'd like to make one addition: I'd like to have the option of hosting the specialist service myself, so that I can store my microcontent if I like, but also get to use the specialist interface. It doesn't need to be open-source, or even free, but even with the ability to do a daily backup from your favourite system like flickr, what happens when they go out of business or the site is down? How do you continue to create your data?
Hi Alf, I recently added RVW to my RSS feed and I've done 2 reviews so far with it (the latest a Doug Coupland book review yesterday). However as yet, All Consuming hasn't picked it up. Is it actually spidering for RVW data yet? Closer to home, can you make Blaxm automatically pick up my reviews via my RVW data?
I like the way k-collector automatically picks up my ENT data from my RSS feed and adds my entries to the k-collector website, so it'd be great if All Consuming and Blaxm would do the same thing.
Generally I'm not a fan of the manual ping to get aggregation services to pick up my content. Isn't that the point of having extensions like ENT and RVW? In effect, ENT and RVW data is a ping within the RSS. It just needs the aggregation services to keep a watch out for it. Even if you had to do a 'register once' type deal, so I could register my RSS feed with Blaxm.
The whole RVW thing (and particularly blaxm) is just an experiment at the moment, stepping towards something that actually works. All Consuming just picks up links to Amazon though, so that should work anyway.
All Consuming has seemed a little ropey recently. I emailed Erik Benson, but didn't hear anything back - I don't suppose you know if he's still actively developing it?
I wonder if people will bother to browse the web in the future or whether spiders will just do it for them? :)