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Editor's note: MyBlogLog API - Q & A with guest blogger Jon Henshaw
Editor's note: Introducing Jon Henshaw, Internet Strategist at Sitening, a Nashville-based Web development and search marketing company, makers of the Raven SEO Tool Set. He's responsible for driving exposure and traffic to his clients' websites via social networks and search engines. He first discovered MyBlogLog last year and has been using it on every blog he manages ever since.

Last month, as soon as he heard about it, Jon signed up for the MyBlogLog API beta. A week ago, we got a tip about this cool WordPress plugin built by the team at Sitening. Please keep in mind that for now these plugins only work if you've got a Yahoo! API key that's been permissioned for the MyBlogLog API beta. If you're interested in trying it out, please apply to the beta at developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog or hang in there just a little longer. The API will be available to everyone in March.

Q: Out of all of the social media APIs that are available, why did you choose to work with the MyBlogLog API?

A: I've always had an affinity for MyBlogLog, because it solves two difficult marketing problems – getting exposure and networking within your niche. Since MyBlogLog already does a good job addressing both of those problems, I was excited when I heard they were coming out with an API and I immediately started thinking about ways we could extend their service.

Q: Is the WordPress plugin the first thing you made with the MyBlogLog API?

A: No, initially we used their API to build some custom pages for our blog. We wanted to implement the API to give us a way to promote and thank our Raven MyBlogLog members. During the process, we wrote our own PHP Wrapper for the MyBlogLog API and turned it into an open source project. The wrapper makes it much easier for PHP developers to quickly build Web applications with the MyBlogLog API. Then we decided to take it further and used our wrapper to create the WordPress plugin.

Q: How does the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin extend or benefit your blog?

A: We believe that Raven's community is essential to the success of our blog. So we used the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin to celebrate and thank the readers and customers who contribute most to the conversation. Our plugin displays a widget with the most active MyBlogLog members, creates a members' list page, and also creates a detailed member profile page. The profile page was especially fun to make, because we took several of the social networks that members belonged to – all stored in their MyBlogLog profile – and retrieved and displayed their recent posts and social bookmarks on it. We also listed their blogs and other related information. So far, the response from our members has been very positive.

Popularity: 30% [?]

At Yahoo!, I spend a fair amount of time on the Web. Not just wasting time on My Yahoo! and Digg, but trying to make sense of the manifold ways that sites expose structured (and not-so-structured) data. There isn't enough agreement about how a web page should describe, say, sports scores or movie showtimes or homebrew mead recipes. Different groups are working on approaches to this problem, including two technologies that get me fired up: microformats, RDFa, and now WebPath.

WebPath is a little project of mine that provides a way to query the web of structured data hidden in messy markup, from the most simple query (like "does this page use microformats?") up to complex, web-spanning requests (like "can I get to a movie review within two clicks from here?").

The ideas behind WebPath were published at the XML 2007 conference, where lots of great conversations started. Now, more discussions are happening, since the full source code behind the project has been released under a BSD-style license. So, what makes WebPath worth looking at?

Regardless of what type of markup a site uses under the hood, my team -- the Structured Web Group -- looks for ways to pull that structured information into an index where it can be sliced and diced in ways that help searchers get instant gratification via immediate answers to their queries. To accomplish this, the team needed to get a feel for which approaches work best with particular sites. It turns out that as these requirements surfaced, a local Hack Day was coming up, providing the opportunity we needed to try some experimental approaches. In little more than 24 hours, the project progressed from scratches in a notebook to a working implementation.

WebPath at this point is a technical endeavor, suitable for those who enjoy command-line programming. It's written in Python. (It pretty much had to be, given the timeline of its development!) You could consider WebPath a kind of XPath engine, to use the W3C jargon, but its main focus is on the "Web" part of its name. Webpath includes access to a module that accepts messy and invalid pages--just like the ones all over the Web--and "tidies" them up into something easier to work with and analyze.

What's next for WebPath as an open source project? Already developers are getting involved, using WebPath in their own projects, pitching in to offer new features, and, of course, helping fix bugs! I maintain a plain-text todo
list of areas for immediate attention, but in the bigger picture I'd like to wire this up to Hadoop as a front end for truly web-scale queries. You too can help shape the future of this project. If you've taken a look at WebPath, I'd love to hear from you.

-m

Golden Web photo by Cyron.

Popularity: 30% [?]