152 weeks agoPopularizing a new data format

So I have this idea about practical semantic web. It's not so much semantic as practical. We have a lot of data online mostly accessible as HTML documents. It's fine for being consumed by user as is, but once you want to mash it up you're out of luck. It looks like there's a great demand for a solution to enable processing data from the web in a more coherent way. Without scrapers, without custom parsers etc. So we have RSS, it serves as a solution only to a fraction of such tasks and still its adoption changed the web dramatically. Looks like there's a lot of demand for a more general solution.

I thought a lot about this and I think I know how to approach it. But how do I popuparize this solution? First of all let's acknowldge that there are many initiatives on the web working on this same problem already (making data less locked in into html). But all of them miss one important point that people will only convert data into new format when there's practical use in that. There's exactly zero use to data in RDF, XOXO or microformat form now. There's no software to use it, no software to edit it. There are some apps (piggybank) but it's so detached from the rest of the web I can't help but ignore it myself (somebody likes it for sure, but in my opinion it sucks). So first thing I need to promote the approach is to make it a solution instead of just an idea. That means I have to show what's the benefit of using Padabam technology and provide useful tools to deal with it.

I've written most of the basic docs already, and in fact I've programmed a cross-platform GUI record editor. So next time I'll explain what it is, what is it for and how to use it all. This will take time to explain but it is a solution and an optimal one, I am going to prove that. For now have a look at the screenshots of the editor:

Questions?