Microsyntax.org is a non-profit focused on identifying, researching and finding consensus on information syntax.
Conventions -- or information patterns -- for various sorts of information content in Twitter messages have appeared in many ways. The use of '@jennalee' to indicate a reply to or a mention of another Twitter user has been adopted by the authors of Twitter, but the great majority of future microsyntax will not undergo the same sort of standardization by fiat. Instead, a generalized sort of experimentation is going on, a sort of competition among various ideas for adding a higher degree of structure to the form of Twitter messages, like the emergence of hashtags ('#sxsw'), the adoption of stock tickers ('$AAPL'), and the newly proposed geoslash for location ('/San Francisco CA/'). These conventions are intended to be both human- and machine-readable, and our goal here is to:
In a sense, we are focusing very much on the tactical level here. We will link to theoretical opinions (see Theory), but the purpose of this wiki is to identify and characterize what is going on, organically, in the open web, and to create a forum where we can discuss how to find common ground when disagreements arise.
This wiki is designed to have five major subsections:
Note: It appears that contributors are putting all contributions in comments. In some cases, like Sightings and Noodlings, the default behavior should be to add to the existing page, or create new pages.
The basic organization of this wiki is open, however, we'd like to have open discussion about people's thoughts and proposals rather than free-form editing as a discussion technique or a way to express disagreement. Please use comments to discuss other's proposals, and edit only after being invited by the page's creator.
Everything posted here is creative commons license -- non-commercial use, with attribution.