Sam Ruby has started up a wiki to discuss what makes a (b)log entry well formed. [via Tim Bray's Ongoing] Rather interesting, though some have their doubts (see the comments to the original call entry). Sam hopes to keep the discussion on an abstract, non-implementation level. So far, it seems that author, content, permalink, and date are the minimal required features (or attributes) for the proposed data model, with some skirmishing on whether to use URIs or GUIDs to identify an entry.
I wrote a while back on organzing ones blog entries, and I'm still interested in how the whole version control / addenda, categorization / cataloging / semantic web nexus will sort out. The shift from MSS to incunabula to books was a tough one. HTML started out as a proposed structure markup language, but quickly became a desktop / web publishing page layout language (in the hands of some web monkeys). At least that's the story the XML alphabet soup folks are sticking with, and I include myself here when I'm not too pessimistic about the web in general. The whole comment thing is still rather ad hoc and unstructured. Think about how footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, glosses, annotations, et al. have developed over the past three centuries. We bloggers have taken over some visual cues from print periodicals (e.g., callouts, headlines, catchwords), but we're still in the early days of blogging.
[Addendum 06/24/03: Tim Bray has a nice followup entry on "why clarifying what a blog entry is" is good and necessary.]
Posted by jim at June 22, 2003 11:36 AM