Structured blogging is back.
This is a marker so I don't lose sight of what might be a significant development next year.
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
Almost immediately, controversy. The engaged but non-technical punter is bound to be confused. On the one hand, Stowe Boyd:
My bet is that Structured Blogging will fail, not because people wouldn't like some of the consequences -- such as an easy way to compare blog posts about concrete things like record reviews, and so on -- but because of the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging. Because blog posts don't have to conform to any structural standards, they can be used to do anything: nothing is out of bounds, because we haven't created the boundaries. The messiness of the world we are living in is one of the reasons that it is such a rich and rewarding experience. I am not sure who is benefitted if everyone falling into line and adopting consistent standards for the structure of blog posts. Perhaps companies like PubSub -- one of the driving force behind all this -- who would like to be able to sort out all the blog posts about hotels, gadgets, and wine out there, and aggregate the results in some algorithmic fashion, and then make money from the resulting ratings and reviews. But I am not sure that it would be a better world for bloggers, or even blog readers. So I favor the microformat approach, which is messy, puts more of a burden on the blogger, and will require a host of tools to be built to make it all work. But microformats will work bottom-up -- tiny little tagged bits of information buried in the blog posts -- as opposed to structurally. And I am betting -- as always -- on bottom-up.
This feels right to me, but the idea that 'The promise of structured content is that we would have an explosion of software aggregating it into useful, specialized services' (bokardo) is attractive (of course) and when I find David, Marc and Thomas all lining up behind it …
Another source of confusion is the link between this, or the lack of link between this, and microformats. Bob Wyman explains that structured blogging is what we do and microformat is just what it says on the can — the format we use: 'The two concepts are orthogonal. They don't compete. They can't compete. Verbs don't compete with nouns'.
One thing seems certain: if it's as unclear as this, how on earth will it take off (assuming it should)?
