INDUSTRY NEWS today's headlines Biotechnology Communications E-Business Internet Law & Policy Personal Technology Venture Capital INSIDERS Instant Messaging WEBLOG COLUMNS today's highlights Amateur Hour the "me" in media The Bottom Line the economics of IT Brain Waves neurons, bits & genes Connected nodes & networks Copyfight the politics of IP Corante on Blogging in media res Got Game? the future of play IdeaFlow creativity & innovation In the Pipeline drug discovery Living Code biology & information Many-to-Many social software Moore's Lore new technology Open Mind open source About this site The rise of mass media in the last half of the 20th Century turned us all into "consumers" and took away much of the natural human inclination to be creators, performers, singers, musicians and storytellers. Today, the rapid proliferation of cheap professional-quality media-making tools, paired with the drastic decrease in the cost of content distribution is leading to a quiet, but quite real revolution in the quantity and quality of "amateur" content. It's the democratization of media, the "Big Flip" as Clay Shirky calls it, and we think it's going to play an increasingly important role in how we make, share and consume media. Amateur Hour background About this editor Technology strategist, product developer, software manager, respected blogger, and general tech evangelist, Jonathan Peterson bridges the gaps between technology, creativity, and business savvy. He's worked for BellSouth, IBM and CNN, among others, and his expertise covers all aspects of the development of intelligent business solutions, from legacy system integration and e-business process re-engineering to the creation and market positioning of award-winning multimedia products. In his future: a possible book on this subject... To contact Jonathan's email him directly. powered by WebCrimson

AMATEUR HOUR: the "me" in media The Empowered Amateur Manifesto By Jonathan Peterson Sunday, November 2, 2003 Blogware Implements Distributed Reviews Blogware has implemented Reviews and Review metadata in their tool.  RVW was already supported as a MovableType plug-in, and through the Blam! publishing tool, which I've been using on Way.Nu for quite a while; but its inclusion in the "standard load" or Blogware should help speed the growth of the standard.  The RVW specification is a module extension to the RSS 2.0 syndication format. RVW is intended to allow machine-readable reviews to be integrated into an RSS feed, thus allowing reviews to be automatically compiled from distributed sources.  In other words, you can write book, restaurant, movie, product, etc. reviews inside your own website, while allowing them to be used by Amazon or other review aggregators.  There should be more than enough RVW metadata out there floating around at this point.  The next step is for someone to build a decent aggregator that collates reviews of a particular topic or two.  Because of RVS, creating aggregate rating scores and summarizing opinions should be very straightforward.  It's really not in the best interests of Amazon, epinions and the like to lose control of their review content, but RVW makes controlling review content impossible in the long term.  Anyone got some pull at the Google skunkworks? posted at 1:01 pm Copyright 2003 Jonathan Peterson. All rights reserved. Terms of use

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