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16 Nov 2005
Google Base MicroContent’ishness
And finally the Google Base service is really available. I like to focus on the MicroContent part of the service. Undoubtedly many other analyses will appear in the blogosphere.
The first question is whether I can call this service a MicroContent enabler at all. I think we can. The service does recognize MicroContent items as separate entities. This can be well seen on my published items page. The Google Items have structure, i.e. each item consists of multiple fields. The overview page gives an indication that there is a minimal set of fields. This minimal set consists of a title, labels (tags) and a description. Each items als has an author and a publication date. Each item does have a permalink, which links to the html-page of the item. Strangely enough this permalink is not always visible on the Items-page, but that can be tweaked. In conclusion Items on Google Base can be called MicroContent Items.
The next question is to analyse how far Google is on the MicroContent road. One thing I miss are the feeds or in fact any other method to export Items. I did not see any. The availability of the search function could result into all kinds of feeds. I hope they will add that at some other stage.
Google Base recognizes multiple MicroContent types: course shedules, events and activities, jobs, news and articles, etc. A user can even create his own Item types. And also existing Items are easily tweaked by adding or deleting fields. Thus the Items in Google Base are really wild.
An interesting function available within Google Base is the bulk upload. A user can point to either a tab-separated vale or XML-file. It supports RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 formats. Interestingly all the various fields are supported as well. They created various format additions to RSS. I have to experiment with this at a later stage. It would be nice when one could let Google Base subscribe to a feed. That would really put the data outside.
[Inspiration John Battelle]