If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking for a day or two since I read Rael’s radar post. I’ve been screaming to myself “there has to be a better way!” While the end product is pretty and polished, the public data isn’t easily human readable and isn’t easily machine readable. It’s sort of nothing at all really.
At the same time, I’m not sure what the best solution is. Would this be a good use of RDF? Would one construct a DOAB (Description of a Book) file or possibly add DOAB information to a FOAF file? Would the information best be stored in an XML document with a custom schema? RSS? Atom? Something completely different? What’s the best way to attack this? My spidey sense tells me that the answer is not a Backpack list with a particular syntax, but I’m clueless as to what the right answer is.
AllConsuming might be a better way to produce this, although I’ve not looked at the new site too hard.
I have another idea as well, which I might get around to implementing someday