Last week, Liza Daly blogged about adding AB Meta to the ThreePress - a set of open source tools for publishers.
Now each book page generated with the ThreePress platform contains AB Meta markup. For example, here is the page for Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin. If you do view source on this page you will see the following code on top:
Now any BlueOrganizer user can navigate to this page and get better web experience - instead of interacting with the flat HTML page, the users can now interact with this book as an object, across the entire web:
Liza choose to implement the version based on the Dublin Core attributes and, remarkably it took her just a few minutes to incorporate the support for AB Meta into entire platform. This is particularly exciting, because platforms, is the right place to support markup formats like AB Meta. When just dozen of major platforms support for AB Meta the web will be a smarter place.
In addition to incorporating support into ThreePress, Liza also wrote detailed tutorial on O’Reilly Tools of Change blog. She advocates the format and points out how simple it is. In addition, she lists a great set of benefits for using AB Meta:
At the time of this writing, there are no applications that are specifically indexing AB Meta content. However, the scheme is quite simple, both for human and computer readers, and is likely to see widespread adoption. Tagging content with it now means that when these tools become available, you will already have significant inventory indexed. In addition:
1. Many of the fields in AB Meta correspond to values in the Google Book Search API. This should make it trivial for Google to match articles about books to specific entries in Google Books, where customers can preview content before buying.
2. It’s likely that tools based on Amazon Web Services will be built on top of AB Meta to allow those tags to generate direct or affiliate links to the Amazon.com book store.
3. Some XML-based workflows already store book metadata in the Dublin Core schema, and AB Meta supports Dublin Core directly.
4. Simpler blog plug-ins that support or even can auto-generate AB Meta are certain to be developed.
Thanks Liza for this thoughtful post and support in ThreePress. These are early steps in marking up the web and events like this help simple ideas like AB Meta to be heard and get adopted.
