At our bloggers lunch, Dan Bricklin gave us a scoop on his announcement of a new metadata scheme, SMBmeta.

Dan realized that periodically (perpetually?) people come up with the idea of building a mega-directory of businesses. That would be handy for anyone trying to locate a business, but it’s too centralized to succeed on the wildly decentralized Web. Instead, Dan’s proposing that businesses fill in a form with relevant data (name, address, goods/services offered, languages spoken, etc.) that then gets saved as XML data in a file at the top level of their site. Anyone who wants to aggregate that data to provide a directory service is free to do so; initially, Dan will set up an aggregation site but — and here’s where he’s so damn smart — he doesn’t want to own this data. If you want to aggregate it, go ahead. Maybe someone already spidering the Web will decide to collect SMBmeta data as well.

SMBmeta is nothing more than a set of XML tags. That’s its beauty. If enough businesses use them, then it will be a howling success. If not, then, well, nothing’s lost, except a whole bunch of Dan’s time.

BTW, the spec is extensible. It enables name spaces so you can add your own fields without worrying about mucking up someone else’s extensions.

If you want more information, go to the new TrellixTech web site. There you’ll find a blog, the spec, and a highly readable paper on the topic.

Any suggestions for a name that’s user-friendlier than “SMBmeta”? “BusiTag”? “WorkPlacer”? How about calling it your “shingle”?

Ok, besides the “shingles” jokes, shingles.com isn’t available. But the BusiTag.com and WorkPlacer.com are.

Categories: Uncategorized dw