The Event Share Framework says this on the front page: Recently, the need to share event information between entities has dramatically increased. Individuals desire to aggregate, publish and distribute event information in many locations, and by various means. Doing this has been made difficult because of a lack of a formal format by which to distribute this event information. The ESF is designed to provide that standard formant, allowing entities to communicate event information in a standard format and manner, by using an XML-grammar, which facilitates the aggregation of information, and provides a well-defined pattern of usage for instances of this grammar. As well as  time, date stuff these are the types of event: event/class event/class/lecture event/class/lab event/conference event/conference/keynote event/conference/session event/entertainment event/group event/group/meeting event/internet event/internet/chat event/internet/webcast event/person event/person/birthday event/person/anniversary event/sports event/sports/broadcast event/telephone event/telephone/conference undefined

Those little XML feed icons on blogs are important, but as the semantic web becomes reality they're going to be much more important, and much more powerful. Marc Canter says this: ..."The battle (or shall I say the cooperation) moves upstream - away from the protocols/plumbing aspects of syndication - to the schemas/details area where the new work is needed." I have to agree. We've enough standards to sink a boat, and with the current RSS/Atom war we (us users) are in danger of missing the boat, before we've had fun sinking it. As users, we need to start using this stuff. And to do that we, us users, need to write feeds, or at least be able to (human) read others' feeds. RSS is pretty human readable, Atom, just ain't. If we can start producing RSS feeds with ENT, ESF or Reviews or FOAF, just chucking them out there, as we blog, don't you think Technocrati or Userland would start to use that XML? Of course they would. Of course I could search for reviews through my Radio aggregator, or through Technocrati or import local events into a nice table in one of my web pages. Or, call up a list of opinion leaders in my geographical region and find where they're going to be next. This is the semantic web, and though TBL may want some other more complex data format, only readable by machines and, it seems controlled by big business, it is the users who are also the producers, just like HTML was so easy to read, and learn and rob.

The Review Module says this: Many people publish reviews on their own websites, but it is currently difficult to take all these opinions into account when making a decision. Individual reviews may have their own rating scheme, may lack a definite description of the subject of the review, and may be of books, music, films, restaurants, beaches, politicians, or any other subject. As online product reviews become [increasingly widespread], it becomes more important to make these critical opinions easily accessible on demand.

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Other title(s) for this story: After the battle there are the writers