The BlogMD Initiative (via The Noisy One): “The BlogMD initiative, by creating a standard ping API supported by multiple CMS developers, will remove this barrier to entry from the weblog metadata application space.”
What it basically means is that you can make your metadata available through an API. It’s similar yet different from XFML:
– BlogMD wants to provide a centrally imposed set of metadata, mostly focussing on things like title, creation date, author and such. “[…] think creatively about what a good set of standard metadata to track around blogs would be.” XFML wants each author to create it’s own metadata structure, and is more focussed on topics without values (a date has a value, a topic doesn’t).
– BlogMD shares its data through an API (using pings, like TrackBack), XFML shares its data by publishing an XML file (like RSS). Pings will scale better and offer some possible cool advantages, XML files offer simplicity and ease of developing for (everyone knows how to parse an XML file).
– XFML is in version 0.8 (not published yet), BlogMD is just starting. We’re ahead ;)
– Ease of implementation: XFML exporting is very easy to implement, full XFML functionality (importing, merging, …) is a lot harder, but BlogMD is even harder.
Overall, they sound like two complementary technologies. Go check them out and if you’re technically inclined, give them a hand!