The MetaSnapPortableDataStandards Guild
The first time I heard the word Microformats, I had no idea what they were and, yet, I was drawn in to find out more. I can't tell you what it was, but there I was, sitting in a hot room at Webzine, eager to hear more about some coding thingy with a very un-sexy name (since then, I find it uber sexy, tho). It was a talk that ran against more 'marketing' and 'community' focused topics, but there I was.
As Ryan presented, the wheels began to turn. I was less than two weeks into living in SF. I had no clue about anything at all, barely knew anyone, was struggling slightly with the learning curve in my new job, and, future-thinking? Ha! I hadn't even gotten to 'today', let alone where things were going. And I still had no bloody idea what Microformats were. If you had asked me 5 minutes after the presentation to describe them and what their use was, I couldn't have told ya.
But it didn't matter. I knew I had to be part of it.
Somehow it was going to drive what Riya is doing as well as connect the 'business' to the 'community', something I so badly wanted to achieve. FFWD to today and, although I'm far from still understanding what exactly needs to be done and how, I do understand a couple of things:
- It requires a standardized format. Connecting to the community requires community collaboration. This means that, not only members of the photo community should be involved (must ping Thomas Hawk and Scott Beale), but we need buy-in from all photo hosting/ sharing/ searching/ etc. communities to make it work.
- It needs to be uber simple. It can't depart from current formats. No re-inventing the wheel. It should be as easy as a click of a button, and on the compliance end, it should be super simple, too. Simple simple simple. In our case, how do people search for photos? For general purpose, what other purposes could well-formed, standardized metadata have for photographs? Mashup with certain Microformats? Better tag-specific RSS feeds?
- It needs to solve actual issues. Not to be driven by business needs, it needs to be driven by actual community needs. The business requirements will develop. We need to develop formats based on actual needs. This one will be difficult in that precedents haven't been set and are so young in development (i.e. tagging). Oh, and as the Microformats basic principles say, "Design for humans first, machines second."
- It needs to be embedable/portable. The metadata gets embedded in the original file. This way you can take your files anywhere you want and not have to duplicate your formatting work. I can't imagine how horrified I would be if Flickr went away tomorrow. I've put so much work into carefully tagging every photo. I would probably cut my losses and never find those photos again.
- It has to come from the community. It can't be designed/owned by one company, especially one of the 'big guys'. This has to be a bottom up, community driven thing. Very little of the above (1-4) would happen if it was. Again, as in how Microformats puts it, "...enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services. Explicity encourage the original "spirit of the Web"."
If you consider yourself a stakeholder, please drop me an email. (don't worry, the name in the title isn't even the 'working' name) ;)
Photocredit: Miss Rogue snapping at BarCamp NYC by Jesse Chan-Norris
technorati tags: metadata, digitalphotography, standards, microformats, photography
1 Comments:
Very interesting. Would love to participate in this at a future time. I've got an event right down the street at SBC Park tonight but think it's a great thing to pursue.
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