NETSPEAK
Structured Blogging
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The objective is to provide standard tools to post categorised entries
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THIS WEEK NetSpeak introduces the concept of structured blogging and a free service for implementing it.
Readers of this column need no introduction to the popular Net phenomenon, Blogging. It is likely that many of you have your own blogs or read many of them regularly.
A shortcoming of the current blogging systems is their inability to provide any means for automatically categorising blog posts. For instance, each of the blog entries need not be on the same subject. If one entry deals with a book review, another may be describing an event. However, in the current blogging systems all entries appear the same.
Obviously, if an entry contains more details regarding its nature, it will help one identify and retrieve the content later. So, if the entry is a book review, the blogging system should automatically display fields on aspects such as author, publisher, category, price, year, ISBN and so on. That is, we need to bring in some structure for specific blog posts. The objective of structured blogging is to facilitate this process.
Structured blogging (http://structuredblogging.org) aims at providing standard tools for bloggers to post their entries with a form relating to the nature of the posting. The form for a book review post will be different from that for a Web site. Apart from providing different structure/style for each of the blog posts, structured blogging embeds the posts with content specific meta-data, which can be read by computer programs. The significance of meta-data enabled blog post is that it may trigger the creation of several content aggregation tools. For instance, if bloggers start entering movie/book reviews in this format, one can build a tool for aggregating review entries from several blogs.
Structured blogging is a new concept and (to the best of this author's knowledge) is not yet available on mainstream blogging systems like Blogger. If you have a blog based on WordPress or Movable Type, you can use the Plug-ins available at the Structured Blogging site for enabling it with structured blogging tools. And, if you still don't have a blog or would like to install a WordPress (http://wordpress.org/) blog, you may access a free web space provider. One provider worth a test is BOINC (http://www.boinc.ch/). BOINC provides you free shell account with 30-Mb disk quota, a home page and access to a web server with PHP/MySQL support. This author has created a structured blogging enabled demo blog at: http://users.boinc.ch/murali/ wordpress/.
Voice mail service
Voice messages have lots of advantages over text messages. It helps you send messages in multiple languages and in different tones for expressing your emotions. With the current e-mail system, to send a voice message you need to record and send it as an attached sound file. However, the size of normal sound file in Wav format will be too large for us to send as an attached file. Also, a common user may not have the necessary skills or inclination to take the trouble of recording and later sending the message. To help us send voice mails without much hassles some voice mail services are coming up. In the past we have seen Slawsome (http://www.slawesome.com), an on-line voice mail service that lets us record/send voice messages directly from it. Voice Snap is yet another voice mail product recently tested by this author. A highlight of this free service is that it offers a voice mail client for composing voice message from your desktop. The client functions almost like a normal e-mail client. When you start composing a new message, it displays a few buttons for recording the message. To send a voice mail, just press the `Record' key, make sure the recorded message is perfect by playing it and send it using the `Send' button.
A small JavaScript program URL, stored as a bookmark on the browser is called a bookmarklet.
Blummy
NetSpeak featured several useful bookmarklets in the past (http://www.hindu.com/biz/20 04/12/06/stories/20041206019 01500.htm). The Google search bookmarklet (http://www.google.com/options/netscape6. html), which helps you start a Google search on the highlighted text from the current web page is a good example. Almost all web based services feature bookmarklets for helping users easily access them. However, if you have several bookmarklets to be used, the toolbar will get flooded with them and at some point it will certainly become unwieldy. A bookmarklet, which can pack a specified set of bookmarklets into a single file and display all of them whenever you need, may come handy. The bookmarklet management service Blummy (http://blummy.com ) helps in creating such a bookmarklet.
J. MURALI
He can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com
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