Structured blogging is here
Phil Pearson, Marc Canter and others have been burning the midnight candle getting Structured Blogging up and running. It's live now and Phil has a round-up of all the action. Structured blogging basically means publishing different kinds of information - like events, reviews and classified ads - in a 'structured' format, so that aggregators can pick up the data from all over the Web.
Thomas van der Wal thinks "it may be one of the brightest ideas of 2005" and Jeff Clavier has a good analysis: "This is a positive development for the industry, eventually pushing blogging into richer types of applications - and enabling new types of aggregation."
Structured blogging has been talked about for a wee while now and, as is usual in the RSS world, has had competing ideas and formats to deal with. But this latest development marks a milestone, because there are now Structured Blogging plugins available for the two main 'early adopter' blog platforms - MT and Wordpress. That's what Phil and a whole host of others (named in his post) have been working so hard on to release today.
With any luck, Structured Blogging will quickly gain some momentum due to the plugins - and before you know it will go mainstream. I'm expecting big things from this in 2006.
disclaimer: I do freelance work for BBM, where Marc and Phil work. But even so, Structured Blogging rocks!
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I'm glad to see this shift. I think it is good for bloggers and good for search engines as well. In times past, users would to to this site to post a classified and another to post a review, etc.
In future, a user's blog can be the home for the content they create. If it is structured search engines can crawl, classify and extract data with greater precision and combine it with other crawl data to build an index from the ground up. The ping system and RSS are great aids toward this end.
This will only heighten the need to do better at spam/gaming prevention but there doesn't seem to be a way around getting caught up in that arms race.
Structured Blogging == Blogger + Google Base
Google almost has it. :)
Posted a quick review at my site with screenshots and example post, etc.
http://www.richardgoodwin.com/wp/2005/12/14/
early-adopting-structured-blogging/