Sam Ruby’s Wiki describes the conceptual data model for a well formed log entry. This is what he wrote:
Authentic Voice of a Person. Reverse Chronological Order. On the web. These are essential characteristics of a online Journal or weblog.
Given the statements above, a well formed log entry would contain at a minimum an author, a creationDate, and a permaLink. And, of course, content.
As to content, a well formed log entry would have well formed content: in the case of HTML, this would include characters properly escaped, tags perfectly nested and closed.
Content would not be limited to HTML. It would include images, audio, and video.
The goal is to help create standards.
A bit about Sam Ruby. He is a member of the IBM Emerging Technologies Group. Excerpts from an interview:
Web logs are extremely intriguing to me. When I said that I found open source addictive, I was talking about the collaboration that I found, the fact that I could post a question and there would be answers within minutes, and that was without me having a prior contractual relationship with somebody. It was just that somebody was interested in the same thing I was, and we were just trying to help out each other.
I’m finding the same addictive nature in Web logs. I just simply post something out there and say, “This caught my interest,” and somebody else says, “Well, that caught my interest too,” and they either comment on my Web log, or they comment on their Web log. And people follow the links.
In open source, much of the collaboration is structured around a very tangible thing: a piece of code. This is not as structured. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’ve not yet figured out what the magic is that makes it all work. In theory, what you do in Web logs, you could do in a newsgroups.
I have to believe that there are ways we could integrate this into things like business processes or things that have real value to customers.
