Review aggregation
12 January 2006 15:43

Some very good points on aggregation of reviews on the Mashable blog:

http://mashable.com/2006/01/12/inods-kritx-and-edge-of-the-network-reviews/

Until you've got the userbase of Amazon, any venture that expects the rest of the world to come and provide reviews and content for its site is going to be far behind those who are able to utilize what's already out there.

As techniques like structured blogging and microformats become more prevalent, aggregating this data in useful ways is going to get easier and easier. I like this way better as it allows me (the content/review producer) to maintain full control over my own content. This is the concept espoused by Steve Mallett in his datalibre efforts. He puts it very succinctly, "Own Your Data - Write Once, Read Everywhere"

Lets extend this idea to genealogy and family history sites. If all the Worldconnects, phpgedviews, and any genealaogy software that produces html pages from genealogy databases would start to add a genealogy microformat to their output, there are a lot of cool genealogical research tools that could be made to spider, aggregate, and merge that data. Sounds like a good presentation for this year's Famiy History Technology Conference.