Salim broke my head in this interview!
This was one of the most informative podcast interviews I have yet done – Salim introduced me to the concepts of structured blogging, and the feed mesh. Structured blogging is a whole new concept in web publishing which literally blew my mind – PubSub will be officially announcing Structured Blogging next Tuesday with Marc Canter (there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for Structured blogging yet – I got the scoop!).
If you publish on the web (if you are a blogger, for instance) you need to listen to this interview
The questions asked and the times in the interview I asked them are below:
Who is Salim Ismail and what is PubSub? – 0:32
What is PubSub? – 1:19
Is this something similar to Technorati’s Watchlists? – 2:01
What kind of people are using PubSub right now and what are they using it for? – 5:14
If a company (BUPA Ireland, for example) wants to use your service for brand management, they do what? – 7:27
You publish full feeds whereas Technorati publish partial feeds (presumably to bring people to their site), so how are you monetising this? – 9:22
No-one left any questions for you on my blog – is this due to PubSub being below most people’s radar? – 11:42
So if you are a job seeker or house buyer looking for houses or jobs with particular criteria…? – 18:30
What is structured blogging? – 19:32
So have you just destroyed Ebay‘s model? – 27:27
The feed mesh? – 31:37
How soon will the tools for publishers be available? – 35:00
How are you going to monetise this? – 38:23
Do you listen to podcasts? – 40:22
Do you have any particular favourites? – 40:57
Download the interview here 9.7mb mp3.
We didn’t get to cover all the topics we wanted to cover in this interview so I will be publishing a follow-up next week – stay tuned!
hmmm.. REALLY interesting interview, thanks Tom (and Salim!).
While I didn’t have any questions prior to the interview I sure have a lot of them now! If only I could formulate them – still trying to figure out the connotations of Structured Blogging!
I’ll be back!
Tom, it was really fun talking to you… let’s have a pint of Murphy’s one day (in Cork!)
Thanks Salim – likewise – but the Murphy’s on me!
So many questions…
Structured blogging sounds really interesting… not sure what I make of it yet. It has obvious advantages in certain areas certainly, and I look forward to seeing the next set of tools…
The following are my initial questions… (sorry if they are somewhat confused, still trying to grasp exactly what’s coming down the line here…)
What types of content does Salim believe will be, and should be, structured – is it possible/desirable to try to structure everything, or is there a very specific list of content types to be structured?
Is structured blogging a commercial tool, or at least does Salim foresee it being taken up primarily for commercial uses?
I ask this last one because it strikes me that average Joe will not want to structure anything (deal with more fields, extra clicks etc) unless there is a return on his investment for doing so – any additional effort in posting to his blog will have to yield results other than visual differenciation (I think!).
So, quicker uptake by potential buyers for his ‘Bike for Sale’ post might be worth the effort, but that post about what he had for breakfast isn’t really going to benefit from structure… or is it?
Which leads me to my next question – could structured blogging radically change the signal/noise ratio by reducing the interest level in ‘what i had for breakfast’ type posts and therefore reducing the level of interest in producing them? If so, is this a good thing?
Is there a move to make Structured Blogging, or structured publishing, an actual web standard?
And finally (for now)…
Is structure more desirable/achievable than the ability to determine relevance?
phew… and that’s just for starters…! But I have to go play poker 😛
Hi Frank… great questions! Tom is interviewing me again, and I’ll start by answering your questions (or attempting to, anyway)… enjoy the poker…
Yeah I remember him talking about this stuff at les Blogs, it’s good to hear an in depth talk on it because he didn’t have that much time to talk about it.
Yeah I’m not that convinced by structured blogging. I’d be interested in seeing how this is delivered. It sounds to me that there is another degree of complicity being added for the lay man and that he simply won’t use it.
Take the Harry Potter example that he gives. I can just go to Metacritic and get it. So if I’m a lay person who is posting a review, why wouldn’t I just post as usual and submit to Meta Critic. Espeicially in light of the fact that more people are turning to desktop publishing tools like ecto, so the WordPress pulgin is effectively rendered useless
What I’m excited about and finally glad to see someone is finally doing is categorised feeds, in that people can search for specifics. I’m just not so sure how quick people will be to actually put the content into that structure. I know that I wouldn’t be that bothered.
I’m going to hold off evangalising this until I see the structure and interface. Any chance of some pics?
@Frank – Salim answered many of your questions in the 2nd interview. I hope to publish that one on monday, so keep an ear out!
@Piaras – if you are interested in seeing how it is delivered, why not try out the WordPress structured blogging plugin?
No doubt Ecto will update to take structured blogging into account – if not, they will be left behind – mind you, I prefer the web interface – many of the other plugins don’t work with the likes of Ecto – think Ultimate Tagging Warrior, for example.
Read Marc Canter’s blog for more about structured blogging and microformats!
Anyone who uses tags is going to want to use structured blogging. By tagging your posts you express a desire to see them included in aggregations of those tags, in the hope that your opinions will be represented in the aggregate.
I use ZDNet reviews and comparison charts before buying gadgets. ZDNet pay dozens of journalists to review hundreds of products and a lot of effort goes into producing detailed reviews, under structured categories, which allow accurate comparisons, to enable informed purchases.
Now, take away “dozens of journalists” and insert “thousands of bloggers”. You can scale the number of products reviewed accordingly.
Listen to the recent Attention Tech podcast featuring Dave Winer and ZDNet’s Dan Farber. Dave thinks career journalism is going to go the way of horse-drawn carriages. Structured blogging is a step in that direction.
Tom – this was a fantastic interview, and I’m looking forward to part 2. I had no idea what pubsub was about before this. Planning a move off blogger to wordpress soon, so I’ll be trying the new for myself.