Classified publishing seem to be popping up all over the place. We’ve recently seen them surface in a number of online communities – both small communities such as Boof as well as big ones like MySpace and sometime soon Facebook (if the rumors are true).
We're also expecting classified listings pop up in blogs. A few people (myself, Rohit Khare, Assaf Arikin) recently proposed a microformat called hListing that would faciliate this. Microformats are a set of simple open data format standards used to implement structured blogging or web microcontent publishing. Part of the idea behind microformats is to “pave cowpaths” – i.e., “standardize and codify emergent, popular behavior on the Web.” Given all the activity swirling around online classifieds over the last few months, seemed like a good time get the conversation rolling on something like hListing.
With hListing, classified listings can published in a way that's easy for search engines to reference them -- whether the listings are published in a marketplace platform that supports microformats or a blog. To give people a sense for how this might work in a blog, Assaf created a WordPress plug-in for the draft spec. This is clearly pre-beta stuff but it helps visualize where this could go…
A lot of standardisation effort has already taken place for the classifieds world, but this is one of the first designed purely for the web, with the aim to display as well. (normally it's a format for transportation only)
Posted by: Marcel | May 16, 2006 at 01:25 AM