Another announcement by Google this week – one that didn’t get quite as much play as the launch at I/O of Google Play Music All Access and improvements to its search, map and Google + services – was this: Support for JSON-LD markup in Gmail.

The W3C in April published a Last Call Working Draft for JSON-LD 1.0 (JavaScript Object Notation for Linking Data), a lightweight Linked Data format to give data context. It has been shepherded along for some time by the JSON for Linked Data Community Group.

Manu Sporny, who has been instrumental in JSON-LD’s development and is one of the authors of the draft, heralds the news here in his blog, noting that it means that Gmail now will be able to recognize people, places, events and a variety of other Linked Data objects, and that actions may be taken on the Linked Data objects embedded in an e-mail. “For example, if someone sends you an invitation to a party, you can do a single-click response on whether or not you’ll attend a party right from your inbox. Doing so will also create a reminder for the party in your calendar,” he writes.

The news was greeted with enthusiasm on a W3C JSON LD message round, as, as Sporny describes it, “pretty big validation of the technology.”

While noting that Google followed the standard closely, Sporny does point out some issues with the implementation – including a major one that Google isn’t using the JSON-LD @context parameter correctly in its markup examples:

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Today sees the launch of Meritora, the first commercial implementation of the universal payment standard PaySwarm (initially discussed in this blog here and here). The creation of Digital Bazaar, the company founded and CEO’d by Manu Sporny – whose W3C credentials include being founder of both the Web Payments Community Group and JSON-LD Community Group, as well as chair of the RDF Web Applications Working Group – Meritora is designed to ease what is still a surprisingly arduous task of buying and selling on the web. The service is starting with a simple asset hosting feature for helping vendors sell digital content on WordPress-powered sites, and support for decentralized web app stores so that app creators can put their work on their web sites, set a price for them, and let them be bought there, at a web app store, or anywhere on the web.

The name Meritora points to the service’s underlying purpose of rewarding greatness, coming from the bases ‘merit’ and ‘ora,’ the latter of which has been used across a number of cultures to express a unit of value, Sporny says (noting that it means ‘golden’ in Esperanto, and was also used as a unit of currency among Anglo-Saxons). That’s a big name to live up to, but the service hopes to do so by making Web payments work simply, securely, quickly, with low fees and no vendor lock-in for buyers and sellers on the digital content scene.

There’s Linked Data to thank for what Meritora, and PaySwarm, can do, with Sporny describing the system as “the world’s first payment solution where the core of the technology is powered by Linked Data.”

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PaySwarm advocate Manu Sporny recently spoke to Tom Simonite about a web standard for online payment. Simonite writes, “Over the past few decades, a handful of open standards for rendering and sharing text and imagery between computers—better known as the World Wide Web—have helped upend businesses worldwide. But these Web standards do not cover ways of transferring money or selling content, leaving us to fumble for credit cards and PayPal account details when it’s time to cough up. That could be set to change. A group affiliated with the body that maintains Web standards hopes to establish an open standard for transferring money online. If the plan is successful, Web browsers could come with features that make it much easier to buy and sell things or transfer funds over the Internet.” Read more

Manu Sporny recently voiced his personal objection to the W3C microdata candidate recommendation. He writes, “The HTML Working Group at the W3C is currently trying to decide if they should transition the Microdata specification to the next stage in the standardization process. There has been a call for consensus to transition the spec to the Candidate Recommendation stage. From a standards perspective, this is a huge mistake and sends the wrong signal to Web developers everywhere. The problem is that we already have a set of specifications that are official W3C recommendations that do what Microdata does and more. RDFa 1.1 became an official W3C Recommendation last summer.”

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Bill Culifer of WebProfessionals.com recently shared an audio interview with web expert Manu Sporny. Culifer writes, “In this fourteen minute interview with Manu Sporny Founder, CEO of Digital Bazaar a leader in the democratization of finance and payments on the Web we learn about Linked Data and why Web professionals should care.” The interview covers: “The history of Linked Data; Tim Berners Lee vision for Linked Data. How data is locked in silos; How Linked Data aims to free the data; How Linked Data differs from the Semantic Web; Examples of Linked Data; Benefits of Linked Data and why Web professionals should care; Recommendations for Web Professionals and how to get started; Linked data plugins and tools; Linked Data resources and best practices; The importance of education and advocacy.” Read more

Manu Sporny recently opined that RDF is facing a problem of perception similar to the problems faced by nuclear power. He writes, “The Resource Description Framework (a model for publishing data on the Web) has this horrible public perception akin to how many people in the USA view nuclear power. The coal industry campaigned quite aggressively to implant the notion that nuclear power was not as safe as coal. Couple this public misinformation campaign with a few nuclear-power-related catastrophes and it is no surprise that the current public perception toward nuclear power can be summarized as: ‘Not in my back yard’.” Read more

Manu Sporny has published an interesting article regarding HTML5 and RDFa 1.1. He writes, “The newly re-chartered RDFa Working Group at the W3C published a First Public Working Draft ofHTML5+RDFa 1.1 today. This might be confusing to those of you that have been following the RDFa specifications. Keep in mind that HTML5+RDFa 1.1 is different from XHTML+RDFa 1.1, RDFa Core 1.1, and RDFa Lite 1.1 (which are official specs at this point). This is specifically about HTML5 and RDFa 1.1. The HTML5+RDFa 1.1 spec reached Last Call (aka: almost done) status at W3C via the HTML Working Group last year. So, why are we doing this now and what does it mean for the future of RDFa in HTML5?” Read more

Last week Manu Sporny announced, “PaySwarm Alpha 3 was released… For this release, we focused on getting preliminary REST API documentation published and the PaySwarm client code into a state that developers could use. The WordPress client code was also updated to match some of the new changes to the specs and the REST API. Most of the major design work is done for the upcoming commercial release of the software, so we’re going to be smashing bugs and tweaking the UIs for the foreseeable future.” Read more

Manu Sporny recently shared his views regarding the difference between RDFa Lite and microdata. Sporny writes, “RDFa 1.1 became an official Web specification last month. Google started supporting RDFa in Google Rich Snippets some time ago and has recently announced that they will support RDFa Lite for schema.org as well. These announcements have led to a weekly increase in the number of times the following question is asked by Web developers on Twitter and Google+: ‘What should I implement on my website? Microdata or RDFa?’ This blog post attempts to answer the question once and for all. It dispels some of the myths around the Microdata vs. RDFa debate and outlines how the two languages evolved to solve the same problem in almost exactly the same way.” Read more

Manu Sporny recently shared his insights regarding open web payment standards, a topic he has discussed here as well. Sporny writes, “The purpose of a value exchange system is to increase the efficacy of human efforts by allowing each person to contribute value in his or her own way. The Web is such a system for the exchange of value in the form of information. It now helps billions of people around the world communicate, become more educated, and collaborate to solve some of the hardest problems known to man. Given the Web’s enormous success, it is a good model to follow for designing a new system for the exchange of monetary value. The key to the Web’s success has been its dedication to open networks and open standards. While it may seem obvious to us now, this was not always the case.” Read more