Data Blogging for Fun and Profit

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 07:41:51 +1000

I've been spending some time thinking about a couple of intriguing posts by Jon Udell, in which he discusses a hypothetical "lifebits" service which would host his currently scattered "digital assets" and syndicate them out to various services.

Jon's partly interested in the storage and persistence guarantees such a service could offer, but I find myself most intrigued by the way in which he inverts the current web model, applying the publish-and-subscribe pull-model of the blogging world to traditional upload/push environments like Flickr or MySpace, email, and even health records.

The basic idea is that instead of creating your data in some online app, or uploading your data to some Web 2.0 service, you instead create it in your own space - blog it, if you like - and then syndicate it to the service you want to share it with. You retain control and authority over your content, you get to syndicate it to multiple services instead of having it tied to just one, and you still get the nice aggregation and folksonomy effects from the social networks you're part of.

I think it's a fascinating idea.

One way to think of this is as a kind of "data blogging", where we blog not ideas for consumption by human readers, but structured data of various kinds for consumption by upstream applications and services. Data blogs act as drivers of applications and transactions, rather than of conversations.

The syndication piece is presumably pretty well covered via RSS and Atom. We really just need to define some standard data formats between the producers - that's us, remember! - and the consumers - which are the applications and services - and we've got most of the necessary components ready to go.

Some of the specialised XML vocabularies out there are presumably useful on the data formats side. But perhaps the most interesting possibility is the new swag of microformats currently being put to use in adding structured data to web pages. If we can blog people and organisations, events, bookmarks, map points, tags, and social networks, we've got halfway decent coverage of a lot of the Web 2.0 landscape.

Anyone else interested in inverting the web?

Gavin Carr's Hackery

Data Blogging for Fun and Profit