Get Into This

A group of about 30 web startups have put together an initiative called the Structured Blogging Initiative, in an attempt to bring some order and standardization to the blog-o-sphere. What is their meaning of structure? According to the site:

Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that's more usable. You can enter information in this form and it'll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.

Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data - events, reviews, classified ads - can be represented in your blog.

Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.

This opens up a whole new world of collaborative sharing of information, beyond the boundaries of what is possible and available right now. Imagine blogging about the sale of your 1949 Ford Mustang and having that information automagically posted up on multiple forums and picked up by specialized search engines (like technorati) that search blog sites, but being able to filter your search by model, year, price, etc. Another quote from the site explains it:

Using Structured Blogging, job listings can be created, posted, searched, and found by any service; buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services.

Visit the Structured Blogging site to read more

A list of ten things to keep in mind if you are considering a web startup. Here's a sampling:

#5: Be User-Centric
User experience is everything. It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it's sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks. Don't get sidetracked by technologies or the blog-worthiness of your next feature. Always focus on the user and all will be well.

[source: evhead.com]

Jason Fried of 37signals mentioned a great book on their blog today. I read the recommended pages (pages 1-6 and 61-64) and I have to agree that the book seems very interesting. Definitely adding this book to my wishlist!

[source: 37signals]

Here is a nice list of Ruby on Rails tutorials that I found on another blog. It's a good place to start learning about Rails and see what others have done with this wonderful little (not so little anymore) framework.

[Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials]

Here's another good resource for the "non-designers" out there. Choose a base color and it'll give you recommendations for a nice color scheme.
[colormatch redux]