Twisty TrackBack syndication
Ben’s had a delightfully twisty idea for Even More Like This: having given up on the idea of using your categories directly (because you say “RSS”, someone else says “Syndication”, and a third person says “XML”, even when they are all posting about the exact same thing), now he wants to start from the list of TrackBack pings that an entry has received, go fetch the TrackBack RDF for those entries, parse out the category name you assigned for that entry, then (much handwaving ensues) from your RSS feed extract the other entries in the same category, and display them on a “more on this subject from other people” page. Sounds good to me, so (if it wasn’t already obvious) I’m writing this entry as an excuse to ping his entry and see how it looks, once somebody (who knows how to use Python’s lovely SGML parser to extract the RDF from its HTML comment prison and (handwaving again) get from there to the RSS feed) builds it.
”because you say ”RSS”, someone else says ”Syndication”, and a third person says ”XML” […]”
That is an issue that is addressed nicely (I’m biased – I wrote it) by XFML: http://xfml.org/spec/1.0.html XFML provides two ways of addressing it:
1. a direct pointer between topics (which can be inherited through the network)
2. a pointer to a ”published subject indicator” (psi) (a concept nicked from XTM topicmaps) which is a page describing the topic, so the software can infere the topics are the same if they point to the same psi, even if they use different names.
XFML does indeed nicely handle the ”I say flavor, you say flavour, he says taste” situation. However, what I didn’t really realize as I gave that example was that ”I say RSS because I have a separate category for the Klip .food format, you say Syndication because you lump them both in one, and someone else says XML because they only rarely talk about it, so they mix RSS, XFML, and SOAP all in one category.”
What I personally want from categorization to be able to sort posts from a variety of RSS feeds into my own topic mapping (not the current extremely coarse mapping, but a reasonably fine grained one), fairly automatically. It’s dead simple with a one-to-one match, quite easy when I’m coarser than they are, but baffling when I’m finer than them. The best I can come up with is a set of terms that are certainly within a topic, so that an incoming post from ”Syndication” that includes ”RSS” or ”RDF Site Summary” is an RSS post, one that includes ”Klip*” is a Klip post, and one that includes neither or both requires manual intervention.
Auto trackback and categorising blogs
Ben Hammerlsey wants more. Well ”More Like this” to be precise: Movable Type blogs now automatically create trackbacks when they
When Doors are Open
It started with Ben Hammersley getting an idea: So here’s what I’d like. Movable Type blogs now automatically create trackbacks when they can. These trackbacks contain RDF, denoting the category the MT blog has that category within. MT produces RDF