The RSS format has provided interoperability between user agents so that pretty much any user agent can subscribe to any content feed to get you some of that syndicated goodness. The problem of course is that the experience for the content providers is no where near as good as the content consumers.
When you first start blogging you typically pick the system out of expediency but you soon learn the limitations of the solution you chose. If you have a significant investment in content it can be very difficult to migrate without a lot of fiddling around.
This is where BlogML comes in. BlogML is something that Darren Neimke is working on that allows blog engines to hive off all their content and place it in a single file which can then be archived or even transported to another blogging system.
Darren has integrated support for it into SUB and if Community Server and dasBlog support the standard the bigger lumbering giants will be forced to adopt it (this is the way standards are born now - you create critical mass instead of spending years talking about it).
One thing that I would like to see in the spec is the original content URL. There are a couple of reasons I want this:
- The first is that if my blog engine supported it – it could put in redirects for the old URLs so that if the URL structure changed all the old links out there wouldn’t get broken.
- When I export my content into BlogML virtually everything I link to should have the option of becoming an attachment. Now lets say that I export more content than I intended and I happened to suck in a few megabytes of video. Well when I import it into another system I should be able to say – don’t pull this data in as an attachment – just link to the original URL. To do that you will need to store the original URL at export time.
I believe that Darren is adding that to the change request list for the spec over on the workspace on GDN.