Review metadata in blogs and feeds

There just isn’t any.

If there is, I’d really like someone to point it out to me.

If you’re providing a review of something, it might be a one-off, in which case this kind of thing isn’t going to be very important, as you’d hope people would read (or skip) the whole thing, but if you’re regularly producing reviews (as on Val’s blog, which I came across earlier), then you need that review data (in his case marks out of ten) to be part of the intrinsic metadata of your post. At this point I’d normally launch into an RDF speech, but there’s not really any point. RDF would be the natural, and best choice for this kind of thing, but to be honest, anything will do. Anything standard, that all the tools could support. Is the notion of a “Review” just too hard to support? It doesn’t need to specify what kind of review, that should be picked up by other forms of metadata. Just please, someone in one of the big publishing tools, start building in support for writing reviews and adding a score to it so we can start aggregating.

Thanks.

Published by

3 thoughts on “Review metadata in blogs and feeds”

  1. Ah, no I didn’t know about that! The screenshots of how it works look really great and are just what I’d like MT, Typepad, Blogger or WordPress to support natively!

    I know that Alf wrote an RVW plugin for MT but I don’t think it’s widely used. What’s really needed is for one of the tools above to take hold of this by the scruff of the neck and enable the RVW module in feeds – it’s not as if it would make anything incompatible – this is what namespaces are for!.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.