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.

Comments

[Rod Boothby]

Microformats are the Nano Technology of Web 2.0

But, I think, Ross, you do not have to worry about people filling in forms. People do not have to actually enter information in a structured format in order to realize the promise of "Structured Blogging". As an aside, don't you think Leveraged Blogging is a better name. You can see a simple example of how this be built into an enterprise blogging solution at Innovation Creators

If the XML pages behind each blog are formated with commonly used Microformats, the pages suddenly become highly leveragable. For example, the XML page behind a Bio Blog becomes a HR tool.

[Dennis Howlett]

Listening to a podcast with Tom Raftery with Salim, I'm under the clear impression PubSub are hoping to take this in the direction of managing (it sounds like) events. This is an order of magnitude beyond what is being currently said. I'd really like to get into the meat of that as it sounds like it strikes at the heart of a lot of my thinking around service based integration. Do you know anything about this Ross?