LJNDawson

We Interrupt This Lack of Blog Posts

I’ve been experimenting. As one might imagine, I’ve been experimenting with metadata and identifiers. On this blog.

Links to books now have DOIs. I’m kinda proud of that. I don’t know what it’ll get me – that’s the experiment. A DOI identifies a thing and the place on the web where it lives. So the ISBNs or ISTCs of the books I’m reading link to a location on Google Sites that I’ve set up. The Google Sites link further to Wikipedia entries, Amazon product pages, and other sites of interest.

I’ve also been experimenting unsuccessfully with semantic markup. I say unsuccessfully because this blog is in WordPress – which has a couple of markup plugins, but I’m still on the WordPress domain (this will change in a bit – so I will give my site a DOI and if you use THAT instead of the URL, you’ll always be able to find it even when the URL changes).

Why semantic markup? Because I am excited about proving the utility of rich snippets. For book publishers and retailers, this is going to be a critical way of differentiating your products from the mass of products that’s out there. God help me, I can’t find any pilot partners in the book industry, so I figure I’ll just do it myself. (If any adventurous publisher or book retailer wants to volunteer for a pilot, you know where to reach me.)

So that will happen, when I can get more time.