I've been obsessing recently about microformats, tagging and structured data; you're looking at the result right here.

Yesterday I stumbled on the right word to bind these concepts together: the datasphere. Rather than directly defining it, let's start with its root derivation, the blogosphere:

Blogosphere is the collective term encompassing all blogs as a community or social network. Many weblogs are densely interconnected; bloggers read others' blogs, link to them, reference them in their own writing, and post comments on each others' blogs. Because of this, the interconnected blogs have grown their own culture.

The datasphere is like that, but for HTML documents containing data. It is an interconnected and highly linked web of documents that has both human and machine readable data. I'll be exploring the concepts needed to make the datasphere in the coming days and weeks, as it builds upon a lot of the work we've been doing at BlogMatrix.

As a historical note, I certainly can't take credit for the word datasphere. It comes from Dan Simmon's novel Hyperion.