Structured Blogging

The Internet has had web sites, audio clips, and video clips probably for most of its existence. Why is it that Blogs, Podcasts, and Vlogs have taken off and are receiving so much attention? I believe that it is primarily because RSS and Atom feeds have given a computer-readable structure to the information and thus allowed easy remixing and aggregating of your content. This morning I read a blog entry that really caught my eye - there is a new WordPress and MovableType plugin that has the potential to add more computer-readable structure to blogging. It will support metainformation about the type or purpose of your entry (e.g. is it about a book you want to sell, or a person you know, or who knows what else) so that aggregators and remixers have the potential to add even more value to your content. Check it out.

From Structured Blogging:

Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that's more usable. You can enter information in this form and it'll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.

Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data - events, reviews, classified ads - can be represented in your blog.

Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.

These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don't look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications. Woven into the HTML of a blog post, this information travels with it through syndication feeds, readers, and aggregators. Ultimately, it can even be converted out to other formats our Structured Blogging tools support such as RDF in XML.

Now anyone can build applications or services based on the structure of an entry. Using Structured Blogging, job listings can be created, posted, searched, and found by any service; buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services.