Darren has started a conversation around the need for a blogging application programming interface. Darren is a fellow Readifian and the guy behind SUB (or SingleUserBlog). In to the conversation he has even managed to rope in Chris Frazier who is behind the awesome tool PostXING which supports many of the weblog publishing platforms out there.
I think that as soon as you start talking about blogging APIs you differentiate content subscription and distribution and content creation and modification. By far the most popular way of distributing blog content is via RSS feeds and the mechanisms simplicity has made it the run away success that it is today.
The content creation and modification mechanism that underpins these feeds however is completely fragmented and there are many priorietary approaches to solving the problem. One of the reasons for this fragmentation is that the driving force behind blogging software has been the technical community and as they encountered problems with what they were using they just coded around the problem not thinking too much about what the overall affect would be – this is a normal, healthy stage of any technology development.
Now with Longhorn –er– Windows Vista just around the corner and RSS content aggregation being baked into the underlying platform I think its time to start looking at the other side of the fence. The problem will be that everyone thinks they know the best way to do it. Some will opt for some kind of HTTP POST driven system whereas others will take the pure SOAP messaging approach – it cuts so close to the bone for some messaging wonks that they won’t even be able to help themselves and get involved in the debate.
What is the right approach? I really don’t know - but as a blogging software user I would really like to be able to just pick up my content and move it from one blog to another – drag and drop style. What that means is that there will probably need to be some kind of standard “post-transport-format”, which encodes all information such as the post itself – images and attachments.
Maybe Darren should work on a better API – and I’ll work on portability of content 