Eye on the Market

I'm pleased to announce a new AOL API has just been released. It's for the AOL Journals service, but is referred to as the Blog API because that's what Journals is underneath. AOL Journals has been hosting blogs for AOL users for over four years, with over a million blogs in use.

Well, of course you can use Feed Readers as always, but now you can also make additions and modifications to blogs programmatically. So, for example, you can create mashups to write user comments to their AOL Journal and also to other services they may want to publish to, or use AOL Journals as a container for comments for your mashup. Let us know what you come up with!

We've stuck to standards here, extending the Atom protocol (RFC4287), and sticking fairly close to the still evolving Atom Publishing Protocol Draft (http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-protocol-17.txt). It's an entirely REST-style based HTTP protocol, and uses AOL OpenAuth for authentication. REST is a very straightforward protocol format - you just do a GET, POST, PUT or DELETE HTTP request depending on whether you want to (respectively) read, add, modify or delete content. The content in this case being journals, journal entries or comments, based on the URL you act upon.

The information you'll need to program to this is available at http://dev.aol.com/aolblogs_api now. It contains a Getting Started document with the basics, the Blog API document with all the details, and Code Samples, right now in PHP and Java. We also have a general forum and a support forum setup for any questions you may have.

In addition we've put up a new sample mashup program we've got in our Mashup Gallery - it's a PHPprogram that finds all theAOL Journals available from people in your AIM Buddy List. Give it a try. It builds on code used in a prior gallery sample to read your AIM Buddy List. It authenticates the user to Journals, so it even collects private journals from your buddies that you're rostered to be able to view. This shows use of AOL's OpenAuth with multiple AOL services. We'll get a sample to modify blogs very soon, so keep a close watch.