Structured Blogging

Structured Blogging is described by Marc Canter as a way to gain structure without people having to look at XML.  Today at Syndicate they released an open source component to structure as microformats in microcontent within social software apps. It currently works with Wordpress and Moveable Type.

Socialtext is supporting this ad hoc standards effort alongside 40 or so great companies. These collaborative initiatives, harkening back to the social software alliance, are perhaps the greatest reason for innovation in social software.

My personal take is this bottom-up approach won't degrade into Semantic Fuzz.  But only a subset of users will fill in forms to contribute metadata (readers are better at it than writers, and they are better at writing in an unstructured way and freeform tagging than the constraints of a form).  The real test is if new innovations provide a strong enough incentive for user contributions at the cost of a form.