Calling all Labour bloggers / B4L Metadata - no comments

Bloggers come in many shapes and sizes. No, that's terrible. I'll start again.

Some bloggers like to discuss, or hold forth on political issues, preferring to keep their identities from distracting from the points they make. Others employ anonymity out of necessity, but for those bloggers who like the idea of a blogging community, metadata (data about themselves, their interests, their concerns) can be used to establish these 'communities' (the fact that many of you would describe yourself as 'Labour-supporting' is why B4L exists), as well as creating groups within groups - just part of the "Semantic Web".

Blogging enables this to happen very quickly. Mostly the work is done manually: you read an article, you agree with it, and so you gravitate towards mini Euston, or "John4Leader", or Labour Students groups, to name but three. Blogger/Google added Blogger Profiles, which allow bloggers to store from a tiny to a moderate amount of information about themselves.

Unfortunately - and incredibly - there's no way to access this information dynamically - that is to say, without a human being going through each blog in a list in turn, clicking a link or two, and copying/pasting the information. Not only that (and probably as a result) there are no good tools for "using" this information. It's even harder with non-Blogger users: hardly anyone uses FOAF, and there's no built-in equivalent of Blogger Profiles.

Now, we at Bloggers4Labour are able use this information easily, but we cannot easily obtain it, so here's what I want you to do:

All B4L bloggers

• Create a post named (or at least prefixed with) "B4L Metadata"
• Write something like "Sorry, regular readers, please ignore this..." or "Ha, I'm posting again, see! I promise to follow this with something even better".
• Follow the remaining instructions...

Blogger users

• Grab the information from your Blogger Profile.
• Paste it into your post, cleaning up any wacky formatting.
• Remove any information you don't want to mention (though bear in mind your Profile is already public!)

Non-Blogger users

• Look at the example profile.
• Either type your own version - as much/little as you want - or paste the example in and change the text.

Final points

• For your location, could you be as specific as you can, and are comfortable with? A postcode would be ideal, otherwise a nearby street or landmark, otherwise a village/town/city.
• Please finish up by asking your Labour-backing blogging friends to do the same.
• Hit Publish!

We'll collect all this information, assimilate it (!), and think about how best to use it. Log into the forum to follow its progress.