[Developers] Blog properties and ping idea

[Liz Henry]

Hello,

I'm new here but have been poking around at Freebase all day, on and 
off, and am really excited about it.

Kirrily and I are talking about a project to add blogs and bloggers to 
Freebase.  This could be approached many different ways, but here's one 
way to start.

Basically it's a nuisance to try and find out about existing blogs.  
There are just too many.  So we want to automatically have them tell FB 
they exist.  One way to do this is to set up a ping service (like 
Technorati has) and use it as a gateway into FB.  Basically the blogs 
ping the service when a post is created, and the ping service then 
extracts data from that to feed into FB.

Using this, we could:

* record new blogs the first time they ping us
* crawl back to the blog to find out its title etc
* first time they ping us, note the "first known entry" timestamp
* each time they ping us, update the "last known entry" timestamp
* Starting date could be another property; perhaps the same as first 
known entry, or perhaps separate

I'm not sure about the handling of group blogs.

It would be nice as well to get starting dates for Blogs but these might 
need to be manually entered.   But, we could extend the project later to 
get historical information exported from various blogging services for 
blog starting dates, titles, geographic information, and multiple authors.


- Liz






-- 
Liz Henry
liz at socialtext.com
http://bookmaniac.net
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com