Well, it’s finally time for me to stop being cryptic. As I’ve hinted in various ways over the past weeks, I’ve been working on developing a new project in the background for some time. And it’s finally ready to see the light of day.
The Initiative is a proposal and a project designed to focus attention on the problem of “metadata” in the blogosphere. The goal is to bring together any and all interested parties — including weblog authors and readers; weblog software developers, and “metadata application” developers (folks building things like my old Ecosystem) — to try to develop open standards to describe the typical metadata which would be useful to track about weblogs. And to then implement those standards into reality; building them into future blogging tools and applications.
It is an ambitious goal, but happily, I’m not alone: I am pleased (and fortunate) to be joined in the project by Phillip Pearson of the Myelin Ecosystem and Dean Peters of blogs4God.com. In addition, we’ve specifically invited several other Blogopshere notables to join the effort; and more generally, we are asking everyone interested to come and participate in the discussion and the work of the project.
The BlogMD site, currently hosted here at TTLB, should have everything you could possibly want to know, so go take a look; it include a detailed Concept Doc, a high level Key Benefits summary, and of course, a FAQ. And most importantly: we’ve set up a Forum (which anyone can post to) for discussion of the effort. And trust me, we’ve got plenty to discuss!
Finally, I’d like to express my personal thanks to those who’ve provided feedback and helped me get this thing off the ground; y’all know who you are.
This is, as Churchill is famously quoted, not the end; nor is it even the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning… so come join in, before you miss the fun!
-NZB
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technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.