Structured Blogging - Benefits & Implications
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Written By Reprise Media | June 14, 2005 | Share This
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Rebellious. Brash. Misguided. Bloggers have been assigned many of the same adjectives you’d use to describe a wayward teenager. So it makes sense that, like many teens, they need structure.
Charlene Li of Forrester has a great post today talking about that very subject, titled Structured Blogging - An Introduction and the Implications in which she elaborates on what structured blogging is, how it can be applied, and the possible implications for the online community.
A concept championed by leaders like Salim Ismail at PubSub, structured blogging is the idea of creating an open standard to standardize mostly free-form blog posts. The firm has created a web site devoted to this topic, StructuredBlogging.org, where it further refines the definition:
“Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that - formatting blog entries around their content….what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers - other programs, sites, and aggregators - better understand the content.
So basically this is about wading through all the different tools (aggregators, search engines, etc.) and technologies (RSS, RDF, Atom, etc.) out there to arrive at a more cohesive way to create (eventually syndicate) blog content.
As Li says, this can be about the group benefit of creating a restaurant review to share with others:
“It throws proprietary content to the wind, but they all could benefit from better content being made available,”
or it could be about a more individual benefit, such as having the listing for that used car you’re selling picked up by a number of specialized used car search engines.
If you’re looking for a clearer picture of what this will look like, here’s a link to some sample content (btw, that Understanding Comics review is right - it’s a pretty great read).
Where could this go in the future? As Li says:
“It [structured blogging] also has some interesting implications for the “ownership” of the data - especially if individuals start putting their reviews and items for sale in a centralized location rather than on individual services.”
Are we our own eBays? Mini-Amazons? Dating service? It doesn’t seem that unlikely. PubSub CTO & co-founder Bob Wyman has more thoughts on this here, but we’d like to know what you think.
Topics: Blogging |