Tag: structured_blogging

Technology

Sneak peek at edgeio!

I received an invite to take a sneak peek at edgeio this morning – edgeio is Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame’s latest startup. The tagline for edgeio is “Listings from the edge” so the name comes from the word “edge” and “io” (input/output?).

The idea behind edgeio is that people can advertise items for sale from their website or blog and if they include the “Listing” tag with the post, the edgeio site will automatically find the post and List it on edgeio. Edgeio will therefore become a free version of Ebay (you won’t have to pay to be listed on edgeio, you simply post on your site including the “listing” tagin your post) where you maintain ownership of the data!

This is very similar in theory to the structured blogging concept Salim Ismail of PubSub talked about when I interviewed him here last December. I haven’t talked to michael about edgeio (yet) so I don’t know if edgeio will read and display structured blogging metadata.

I tried out a posting this morning on my WordPress.com blog (I don’t think posting for sale items on this site is appropriate to its content to date) and sure enough it showed up on edgeio – it took a few attempts to get it to show up but I think that was down more to my ineptitude than to any problem on the edgeio side!

You can claim your website/blog on the edgeio site so all future postings on your site are associated with your profile and you can link your profile to other services like LinkedIn, Flickr etc. You can also associate your profile with where you live in the world, which is handy obviously – esp when selling large/heavy items like I posted this morning.

Edgeio also have a sidebar you can add to your site, listing your posts on edgeio (and other people’s posts if you have very few) – edgeio say that this function:

can add useful content to your website and in the future can be the source of income.

Edgeio sidebar widget

As you can see below edgeio allow you to add tags to your listing and also metadata like price and status

Edgeio edit listing page

However, I couldn’t find the pricing or status info I added anywhere
Edgeio listing page

Overall, I think this is a fantastic idea (I have listed several items on Ebay and never sold any of them!). It needs a bit more work (I couldn’t find currency info for example) but this is still very early days for this application so I have no doubt it will only get better and better.

UPDATE:
I tried adding the sidebar widget to this site but it doesn’t appear to be functioning yet – what appears in the sidebar is the edgeio homepage! Also, I have just realised that the posting I put up on my site never received a trackback from edgeio – still it is listed in edgeio so I can’t complain.

FURTHER UPDATE:
I added the tags “Cork” and “Ireland” to my edgeio listing – anyone posting from Cork or Ireland should do likewise so we’ll be easily able to find each others items.

trackback.at

Podcast

Podcasts moved mp3

Podcasts moved

Artist: Tom Raftery IT

Duration: 1:15

Created: Tue, 20 Dec 2005

Location: Cork

Category: Speech

Producer: Tom Raftery

Director: Tom Raftery

Actor: Tom Raftery

This is a quick post serving two purposes:
1. The first is I am posting an mp3 alerting people who have subscribed to my podcasts here to the fact that the podcasts have moved to PodLeaders.com (if they haven’t visited the site and aare simply subscribed through iTunes or the like they may be wondering why the long break between interviews!) and
2. I am trying out Structured blogging! This post is being created using the Structured Blogging WordPress plug-in available free from the Structured Blogging website.

The mp3 to alert people to unsubscribe from the podcasts here and subscribe at Podleaders.com is available for download here.

Tom RafteryTom RafteryTom RafteryThis is a quick post serving two purposes:
1. The first is I am posting an mp3 alerting people who have subscribed to my podcasts here to the fact that the podcasts have moved to PodLeaders.com (if they haven’t visited the site and aare simply subscribed through iTunes or the like they may be wondering why the long break between interviews!) and
2. I am trying out <a href="http://structuredblogging.org/&quot; title="Structured Blogging">Structured blogging</a>! This post is being created using the <a href="http://structuredblogging.org/structuredblogging-wp-1.0pre11.zip&quot; title="Structured Blogging WordPress plug-in">Structured Blogging WordPress plug-in</a> available free from the Structured Blogging website.

The mp3 to alert people to unsubscribe from the podcasts here and subscribe at Podleaders.com is available for download <a href="http://www.tomrafteryit.net/audio/tomrafteryit_bye.mp3&quot; title="site move mp3 file">here</a>.

Blogging, Business blogging, Technology

Launch of Structured Blogging

I see Jeff Clavier has a post about the launch of StructuredBlogging.org at the Syndicate conference. Structured blogging is

a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.

For more see the structuredblogging.org website.

The announcement is being made by Marc Canter, and Salim Ismail of PubSub.

This is very fortuitous timing – Salim pre-announced the structured blogging initiative in his amazing podcast on this site last week and co-incidentally, I am interviewing Marc canter at the end of this week for a podcast to be published next week!

Are these podcasts topical, or what?

Blogging, Interviews, Podcast, Search Engines, Technology

Salim Ismail interview podcast II

As promised, here is the second interview with Salim Ismail – Salim is chairman & co-founder of PubSub and he very kindly agreed to come back on the show to follow-up on some of the things we talked about in the last podcast – if you haven’t listened to the first interview I did with Salim, I would strongly advise you to listen to that podcast before listening to this one.

In this podcast Salim outlines his thesis that businesses will move away from being data and report driven towards an event driven model – using a publish and subscribe event server and event aware client software. It makes for absolutely compelling listening.

The audio on this podcast was quite poor at my end – there was a horrible echo so I had to delete and re-record many of my questions.

Here are the questions i asked and the times in the interview at which I asked them:
What kinds of content will be and should be structured in structured blogging? – 1:30
What other kinds of applications do you see for structured blogging [apart from book reviews]? – 4:49
Is structured blogging going to be primarily a commercial tool? – 8:35
When you talk about Event Management, do you mean the Financial Controller being alerted whenever an invoice goes over 30 days, for example? – 16:07
Will you need a smart RSS reader to receive this data? – 21:33
Currently there is no event management server software available, is this all in the realm of speculation? – 23:17
If a company wanted to roll this out tomorrow, what would they need to do? – 27:24
I can’t go down to my local software store and ask for an Event Server and 5 client access licences though… – 28:37
So are PubSub offering their event routing engine for sale to companies? – 31:49
Will Ebay and Craigslist come along and aggregate the content of structured blogs? – 35:33

Download the interview here 8.5mb mp3.

Interviews, Podcast

Salim Ismail interview podcast

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!