Word of the Day: Pingwidth
A tip o’ the hat to Stowe Boyd who has coined the (now obvious) term pingwidth. In his comments replying to my earlier post:
I agree. It is very bad mojo. But we still are going to wind up with a 'pro' version -- for extra cash -- with all the fancy bells and whistles (geolocation, etc.) and more 'pingwidth' than the basic stuff. (Yes, I did say 'pingwidth'. You heard it here first.)
I agree with this. We’ve been talking about ‘fat pings’ versus ‘thin pings’ for some time. The narrowest ping in terms of pingwidth would be just a URL indicating the feed that changed. Current pings submitted through weblogs.com are only marginally thicker. The basic ping through weblogs.com has:
- Weblog Name
- Weblog URL
- Permalink URL [optional]
- Category Name [Optional]
An extended ping on weblogs.com adds a RSS URL, which points the ping server at the RSS feed related to the post.
In terms of pingwidth, that’s minimal. As Stowe Boyd suggests in his reply, there is demand and usefulness for fat pings. Pings that come not just with the URL-based information contained in the basic ping above, but also metadata like:
- geo-location (where the blogger is posting from)
- geo-referencing (places mentioned in content)
- people names
- author’s tags
- trackbacks/pingbacks
- comment notification
- digital signatures & trust assertions
- media/attachment metadata
That’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea – much more pingwidth. All of this information is useful in some consumption context, and much more efficient if submitted with a ping rather than having to be discovered by URL dereferencing and crawling.
‘Pingwidth’. Wish I’d thought of that…
Comments
Do you plan to work with one of the existing standards like RSS Ping or AtomStream or invent your own?
Posted by: Matt | October 17, 2005 07:35 PM
Matt,
We'd just as soon not invent anything here. I like both of the specs that you mention, and in the case of Atom, that'd be a framework we plan on fully supporting. RSSPing2 is in the direction we'd like to go, too, but hope to find a way to integrate even stronger crypto into whatever gets adopted. In any case, we're committed to building community consensus around open protocols for ping and content submission. Looking forward to engaging with you when the time is right.
-Michael Graves
Posted by: Michael Graves | October 18, 2005 11:26 AM