Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

Alex Faaborg writes about icon sprawl resulting from the increasing number of applications and web services that support structured web information like feeds (RSS and ATOM), reading lists (OPML), events, contacts and locations (Microformats): Structured Data Chaos. For every combination of structured data and client applications for structured data, there has to be an icon or action that adds visual clutter to the web user interface.

A similar problem appears when considering social bookmarking services like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, mister-wong.de (a popular german social bookmarking website) and others. Wired News calls this: Battle Over 'Iconistan' due to the increasing number of bookmarking icons that clutter the interface of news sites and weblogs.

Alex Faaborg suggests to solve this problem by implementing a solution in the browser, similar to what has happend with feed support in web browsers: The web browser is able to autodetect the structured information and cares for integrating the client application.

I've got two questions: Will browser development keep pace with the development of structured web formats or will the world have to wait another two years for an update of the world's most widely distributed web browser? And so far I have not seen any proper integration of web-based feed reading services that is supported by the feed autodiscovery feature of web browsers.

One commenter to the Wired News post recommends a wordpress plugin that hides all social bookmarking icons until you click a "share" button, something like a meta-social bookmarking plugin. It could be a solution to have a similar meta-web-service (in the web 2.0 sense, not in the SOA sense) that is able to push structured data to the desired web-based or desktop client.

I've attended yesterday's Webmontag in Berlin. It was quite interesting, but the interesting parts were not the ones I expected:

Ting and Gobby

Mattis Manzel talked about Ting. A ting is a collaborative editing session that is supported by three tools: A collaborative editor like Gobby, a Voice-over-IP client like Skype or Teamspeak (Mattis said Teamspeak's push-to-talk-feature makes it the best program for tings because it does not distract from writing and disciplines the users) and an extension of MediaWiki that will save the exported document (The extension seems to be Mutante/MoonEdit and was originally designed for the proprietary MoonEdit).

The main idea is that a bunch of people meets at a specified time at a certain server and launces their collaborative editors. The appointment for time and server will be made using a wiki page. People start writing and discussing what they are writing by embedding comments into the document and using the VoIP tool. After completion of the ting, which might take from 30 minutes to five hours, the created document is copied into the talk page of the wiki.

From my point of view, collaborative editing is an extremely intesting topic and I see many connections to Wiki software, but I am not sure how the Ting concept could be used for more than geek entertainment.

Structured Blogging

The part was the unexpectedly interesting part. Baju Bitter introduced Structured Blogging, which I head about before, but have seen it as just another way to make blogging even more complicated. After hearing Baju's talk, I've changed my opinion. The basic idea of structured blogging is to define data types for blog entries. For example an weblog entry can be a review of a book or a movie, it can be the announcement of an event and many more. The structured blogging initiative provides a definition of blog entry types and relies on the popular microformats concept which embeds machine-readable data into HTML by using CSS class definitions. Furthermore it provides plugins for two weblog tools that make creating structured weblog entries easier by providing editors that are suited at certain blog entry data types.

Most interesting part of this concept is that there are already aggregators that are utilizing these structured blogging contents.

• edgeio finds listings of things you would like to sell in blog entries, think of it as a decentralized ebay (which would need Rapleaf integration, of course)
• incredibooks is a list of book reviews by children and teenagers.

If you are capable of reading german, you should further check out Baju's collection of links, his weblog entry on this Webmontag and the german structured blogging website and forum he maintains.

Readers Edition

Finally Peter Schink of Die Netzzeitung showcased a new Cititzen's Journalism project: Readers Edition which will go live soon. Nothing new, but nice webdesign.