Via Ming the Mechanic's blog, a post on microcontent that points us to Syncato, which then points us to Kim Staken and Jon Udell.

As I read Jon Udell's post (below) I got quite excited, because the latest additions to Qumana take us directly into this territory for working with and managing microcontent.


Kimbro Staken's XPath-searchable blog

Kimbro Staken's new blog software, built on top of Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, echoes a theme I've been working with myself for a while. A collection of well-formed weblog entries is, implicitly, an XML database whose contents can be searched and intelligently recombined. I've been toying with a simple file-based solution that creates an XPath search interface to my blog content. Kimbro's approach takes the next step:
Now the really interesting feature of this system is that it's really an XML database Web Service. I exposed an XPath query facility through the URL so that the database can be queried via HTTP GET. [Inspirational Technology]




Kimbro gives this example:


http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//a (all links)


But I can change it to, for example:


http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//table[contains(.,'Annie Lennox')] (tables containing 'Annie Lennox')


Very cool! As Kimbro points out:
The possibilities of this are endless, especially as you add more meaningful markup to your posts.
I just love this idea of incorporating XPath into RESTian URLs. With Kimbro's approach, you get immediate use of the markup you create -- just the kind of incentive that's need