Latest Blogware developments

Major improvements to Blogware’s “Help” files

The Help files for Blogware are improving in leaps and bounds as I write more every day. Check them out!

• If you’re a Blogware user, you’ll find more useful information to help you get the most out of Blogware (and more is on the way!).
• If you’re not a Blogware user, but interested in becoming either a Blogware reseller or user, they’ll give you an idea of what Blogware is like.
• If you have any suggestions about the Help file, whether it’s to correct an error, add something that’s missing, or clear up something that’s unclear or confusing, let me know in the comments for this entry!

I make additions to Blogware’s Help files every day, and my plan is to make it the most complete and useful help file for any blogging software out there.

If you thought you heard the sound of a gauntlet being thrown, that’s because I just threw one.

Blogware supports book, music and movie reviews!

“Big fat hairy deal,” you might say. “There’s no difference between a blog entry about what I did last night and one with my review of Cory Doctorow’s novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.”

You would be correct — and therein lies the problem. We humans can tell the difference between blog entries that are reviews and blog entries that aren’t by context; our fancy-pants brains are pretty good at that sort of thing. But our dumb computers aren’t — they’re only good as following incredibly simple instructions with incredible speed. As far as a computer is concerned, there is no difference between a blog entry about what you did last night and what you think of Cory’s book. Or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ album. Or that masterpiece of cinema-guano, Freddy vs. Jason. To a computer, it’s all text (actually, it’s all numbers, but let’s not get too nit-picky).

The end result of this ignorance of your computer’s part is that you end up having to searching for things on the Internet in a roundabout way. When you Google for reviews of a certain book, you’re not actually asking for reviews of that book, you’re asking for documents that contain words that you think are likely to be in reviews of that book. The outcome varies; sometimes you get lucky and get what you want, sometimes you have to sift through the results.

Since computers are terrible at classifying information by looking at its context, methods of marking data with metadata — additional information about that data — were developed. Using metadata, it’s possible to mark a blog entry with a little note for a computer’s benefit that says “this is an album review for album X by artist Y, and my opinion of this album is Z“. Once data’s been marked this way, it’s possible to build programs that can better answer questions like “What do people think of album X?”

Blogware’s reviews are the first step in this direction. Let’s consider one kind of review that Blogware provides: book reviews. In addition to the standard fields for a blog entry (such as “title” and “body”), Blogware also provides extra fields for you to add metadata about your book review. Here’s a screenshot from the entry page for a Blogware book review showing these extra fields:

Readers of the review see the usual blog entry accompanied by this little summary box that displays the extra information entered in those extra fields as show below:

Having a summary is like this is a convenience for human readers, but the same information is also put in a form that computers can read. This opens up all kinds of possibilities. It’s now possible to ask a computer to find reviews of a specific book. Or find what people consider to be an author’s best book. The attention span-challenged can find books under 100 pages and David Foster Wallace fans can find other authors afflicted with logorrhea. Using this metadata, it’s even possible to get fancy and find out a hot new author or when an old author “jumped the shark” by correlating reviews with publishing dates. Once a computer is given some kind of understanding of the data, all sorts of useful (and useless, but fun) data-crunching is possible.

If you’d like to read more about entering reviews, check out these Blogware Help pages:

• Music Review
• Movie Review
• Book Review

Some geeky detail

Blogware’s review metadata is included in the RSS (2.0) feed. It uses Alf Eaton’s RVW (RSS Review) Module for RSS 2.0. If you want to see RVW in action, take a look at Boss Ross’ review of the Danny Michel album — first the human-readable version, and then the snippet of the RSS feed shown below:

<rvw:item>

      <rvw:link>

      


      </rvw:link>

      <dc:identifier>UPC:B0000BZNJB</dc:identifier>

      <dc:title>Tales from the Invisible Man</dc:title>

      <dc:creator>Danny Michel</dc:creator>

      <dc:date>2003-08-19</dc:date>

      <ent:cloud ent:href="">

          <ent:topic ent:id="Alternative Rock"

          ent:classification="music" ent:href="">

              Alternative Rock

          </ent:topic>

      </ent:cloud>

      <rvw:rating>

          <rvw:minimum>1</rvw:minimum>

          <rvw:maximum>10</rvw:maximum>

          <rvw:value>9</rvw:value>

      </rvw:rating>

  </rvw:item>

  

I’ll cover this in greater detail in a more suitable blog for this topc: The Farm.

As with the help files, questions and comments are welcome.