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28 Nov 2005
Lists are no MicroContent
Marc Canter says that (Reading Lists) are MicroContent. I did agree sometime ago, but I have a feeling that things are more complex. Or at least our terminology is inadequate.
I'll attempt to deconstruct things. A Reading List contains a set of links that point to feeds. And a Feed is a (scrolling) list of blog items. And a blog item can not further be deconstructed.
The problem I have with a Reading List is that I am not sure what the MicroContent Item is. Is it the list itself? Or the links within? I go for the latter. The links are the MicroContent Items. And the MicroContent Type of these Items is bookmarks. For me a Reading List is then a feed of my (feed) bookmark items. And that is how I implemented it. And consequently a Reading List is not really MicroContent, it is a MicroContent List.
Thus it is all a question of semantics. I bookmark weblog-feeds and add them to my bookmark weblog (or to del.icio.us). I can create a webpage for these bookmarks, or a static feed. This feed is static as it contains all bookmarks and is not a sliding view. The content of the feed, the items (bookmarks) with only feed uri's, determines the name of that feed: a ReadingList feed. And similarly I could create a Reading List web-page (in HTML-format) or a Reading List directory (in OPML-format). However when the List of bookmarks point to blog URI's, I call it a blogroll. So it is the content of the list that counts. And that is expressed through the semantics of the word we chose to use for the List (Reading List, blog roll, bookmarks, etc).
[Inspiration Marc Canter]