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!

My first Radio Userland blog was called 'Modern Web' and was short-lived (more info here). But about about a year later Read/WriteWeb was born. Here's a screenshot of the first blog.

Larger screenshot

I went looking for some info on Bloglines "functional blogging" and all I came up with was a hint from Mark Fletcher during a speech that Ross Mayfield blogged:

This is an interesting subject. I myself have been noodling away on a business idea for 'the future of blogging', but more on that in good time.

For those of you not familiar with Structured Blogging, it's an initiative that gives bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information - such as reviews and events. Kind of like what edgeio is doing commercially. Indeed I've always seen edgeio and SB as being highly complementary. I anticipate that a whole raft of other aggregators will emerge over the next few years, to collect structured data over the Web. Imagine an edgeio for reviews, or an open events aggregator. It's all about the edge, baby!

Structured Blogging is also about providing tools for using microformats, so you don't have to be a geek to use them ;-). SB.org currently offers two plugins for the popular blogging platforms Movable Type and Wordpress. In the future, we hope to see SB integrated into hosted platforms like Typepad and wordpress.com.

I'd recommend looking at the new Roadmap if you're at all interested in where Structured Blogging is going. Marc Canter largely created the roadmap, with input from the PubSub and BBM teams. Here's a snippet from it:

"In Part 2 of the Structured Blogging project, we want to enable people to DO things with microformats. Structured Blogging is all about providing end-users with solutions, enabling them to use microformats and microcontent. We're in the era of the 'Live Web' (or Web 2.0), which is about content applications and services that utilize the Web platform. But to make the Live Web work, we need compatible schemas and APIs to mesh all our apps and services together. There are a lot of missing links currently in the Live Web, which is where Structured Blogging can help."

Finally, if you're a blogger wondering: what's in it for me? Check out the new Benefits page. It's a great starting point.

"In the order of importance, the affiliate sales of the shoes and the fashion, the contextual ads like the google and the chitka, the blogads, then the Amazon, and then the tshirts and the miscellaneous. This, of the course, does not count what the Manolo receives for writing his new column in the Washington Post Express."

To make money from blogging, The Manolo suggests to write well and in an entertaining, lively style. I especially liked this advice:

"Do not be afraid to be different, in the fact, being different it is the advantage in the marketplace where there are fifty hundred new blogs on the topic you have chosen."

Now, I have to admit that since I've gone freelance the idea of earning more money from blogging has become more important to me. I've tweaked the ads here at R/WW a little bit, but really R/WW is never going to make me a six figure blogger - and that's OK, because it's not intended to. I should also note that long-term there is probably a lot more money to be made in Web 2.0 product development than in blogging, if you have some killer ideas and know how to implement them.

Incidentally, if you haven't gone out of your RSS Reader for a while, you won't have noticed my subtle re-design - brighter colours, menu in the top horizontal bar, etc.

But anyway, my point is you need to choose a mainstream-ish topic and then follow The Manolo's advice.

Darren and friends new blogging network is one I'm looking at closely. Called b5media, it includes a couple of tech-related blogs on topics I could easily cover to try and earn some money from blogging. e.g. The Unauthorized Microsoft Weblog.

So I thought I'd throw the question out to you - if I was to create another blog or two with the intention of supplementing my freelance income - what topics would you suggest I cover? Doesn't have to be web tech. I think I should continue my focus on earning my living through analysis and web 2.0 company ideas, but it would be nice to earn a little more from blogging too.

How Blogs Are Leveraged in Churches

Brian shared four specific ways that churches are leveraging blogs:

• Internal Communication Vehicle for Their Staff
• Announcement System for Volunteers and Members
• Pastors Connecting with Other Pastors
• Communicate Information About New Ministries / Churches

"Then, one just really core thing is that it has really proven to be such an incredible way for pastors to connect and relate to other pastors. In the past, being a pastor of a church is usually a very lonely position, and the only time you really get to interact with your peers is at a conference once a year, and you can barely afford to go to that. So, a lot of times, it’s just kind of lonely at the top and you have the people in your church but really nobody will understand what you’re going through...

So, that to me has been probably one of the core ways that blogs have been used. It’s just pastors talking to other pastors and getting that feedback, getting support, learning from each other and things like that, and being able to do it so inexpensively. Pastors are always so pressed for time. Blogging is something they can do at any hour of the night and get that response throughout the week and things like that. So, I think it has been really powerful."

This is something we can all relate to. One of the things I've enjoyed most about blogging has been the interaction with a blog's community. It's great to see that the non-profit world leverages blogs for the same purpose.

If you're interested in learning more, you can listen to the full interview here.

I love the concept of edgeio, because it's almost exactly the same ideal as the Structured Blogging initiative. Structured blogging 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. In fact, at the bottom of the structuredBlogging.org homepage is a pretty good description of what edgeio does!

"Now anyone can build applications or services based on the structure of an entry. Using Structured Blogging, [...] 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."

Replace "any number of search services" with the word "edgeio" - that's what edgeio is about.

[Full story on ZDNet...]

Many people are only just coming to know the newer services like Posterous, so in this post we give you 5 tips to get the most out of them. The post is in the same vein as our earlier How to use Facebook one.

Blogging started out in the early days as a text-heavy medium; and to this day professional blogs (such as ReadWriteWeb) rely mostly on text. But the whole point of light blogging - sometimes called micro-blogging - is to be more casual and colorful. So post lots of media: photos, video, audio. Most light blogging services offer a browser bookmarklet, which enables you to post media at the click of a button.

Here's an example of easily published media from a Posterous blog called ReflectionOf.Me:

2. Subscribe to Other People (& Re-Blog)

One thing that hasn't changed about blogging is the sense of community. Half the fun of maintaining a blog is reaching out to your network. So be proactive in finding people who blog about similar things as you, then link to them and even re-blog their posts (copy and paste - it's much more accepted in light blogging than in professional blogging!).

At this stage, the market leader Tumblr still offers you the best chance of finding like-minded souls - due to the sheer number of people using it. Here's an example of community from a Tumblr user called rudie. Note the "following" panel on the right, which lists the other blogs that rudie follows.

3. Aggregate Content From Your Other Apps

With light blogging, you needn't even spend time actually blogging - because you can pull in content automatically from other apps. While FriendFeed and even Facebook are common methods for many of us to aggregate our content from across the web (a.k.a. 'lifestreaming'), it's just as easy to do so using Tumblr, Posterous or Soup.io.

To the right is an example from my own Soup.io blog. Every week Soup.io polls last.fm and automatically publishes the top 5 artists I've listened to in the past week.

4. Customize Your Theme

All of the leading light blogging services offer a variety of colorful themes. If you're handy with HTML and/or CSS, you can customize your template too - if you want to make it unique. Here's a cool MySpace-esque design from Tumblr user Juice in a Box:

5. Don't Take it Seriously

It's not called light blogging for nothing (actually it wasn't called light blogging at all, until we clumsily coined it!). Services such as Tumblr, Posterous and Soup.io make it very easy to experiment with blogging, have fun, see new things, meet new people. Why not give it go...

From Sween's Tumblr blog

I only found out today, so I'll be reading the Jupiter Research report on RSS Readers over the next couple of days. Expect a post from me about it by end of this week.

We're curious to know which of these services our readers use. Let us know in the poll below, or make a comment if yours is not listed.

In the example to the right, I posted a video of a band I like to my Soup.io blog by simply inputting its MySpace video embed code and adding a couple of lines of comment. Much less effort than writing a post on ReadWriteWeb ;-)

Compete data shows that Tumblr is the clear leader in this market, with Posterous about to overtake Vox as number 2. Note: we didn't include wordpress.com or blogger.com, because they are much larger than all of these and are used for different purposes too.

Here is our poll, please select the light blogging service you use most often. There are many smaller services around, so the list below is certainly not comprehensive. If yours is missing, add it to the RWW comments.

How it works: new users click the 'Create listing on edgeio' button and are first invited to register for an account. After that the user is taken to a WYSIWYG editor to enter their listing:

Once they've entered their details, a new blog is created. Coming soon is skinning and personalized URLs. Essentially this is a blogging platform that non-technical people will find easy to personalize. Even so, it'll be interesting to see how many people do continue to use their personal edgeio blog. The jury is out on whether this will entice more people to be bloggers.

Another new feature is that old-hand bloggers can now add their posts to Edgeio, without needing to tag them in their own blog authoring tool. Users simply enter their blog URL into edgeio's 'Get listings' textbox (on the homepage), click the button and a list of  their latest posts display. This is a useful feature for people like me, who don't bother tagging their posts - even though we know we should.

I think we'll see similar tools being created for the Structured Blogging initiative in future (nb: I'm currently re-designing the SB website). If you recall Structured Blogging supplies tools for people to create posts that have extra metadata, so that niche aggregators can automatically harvest them. For example, what if someone wanted to do a movie review - but they don't have a blog? A Structured Blogging aggregator that specializes in movie reviews could provide the same 'instant blogging' tool that edgeio provides its users, enabling non-bloggers to quickly create a movie review on their platform. Likewise the instant tagging feature that edgeio has can be applied to Structured Blogging aggregators.

When you think about it, edgeio is one of the pioneering Structured Blogging aggregators - even though they don't use SB tools or microformats such as hListings.

Once you have added video to your live blog, users will see it at the top right of the application, but they can also pop it out and resize it. This is quite similar to how CoverItLive already handles YouTube videos, though the option to see videos in their own windows is new. One major advantage for bloggers here is that they can handle text and video all in one application.

CoverItLive provides writers with what they call a 'Writer Console,' which is quite different from what end-users see (see screenshot). The console is the main hub of the application and allows you to add polls, images, audio files, and now, live video. It also displays reader comments on the right side of the application.

One major advantage of CoverItLive is that it allows various writers and editors to work collaboratively, so that one person can handle the writing, another the video, and yet another blogger can focus on interacting with the audience.

Adding live video turns live blogging into a more interesting and immediate experience. Thanks to the proliferation of Qik on mobile phones, we will surely see more events being covered this way. We already liked CoverItLive a lot when we first reviewed it, though it did experience some outages when a lot of people used it during the January Macworld keynote. Since then, though, the platform has become a lot more stable.

The Blogging Scholarship is the largest of the six scholarships offered by the site (they also offer a $2,000 award specifically for political blogging) and is open to any US citizen, student blogger, regardless of blog topic. If you don't have a blog, site encourages students to begin now and submit your name for consideration by the deadline next month.

Last year, the award was $5,000 and went to DailyKos diarist, "MrLiberal," a.k.a., Stephen Yellin of Drew University. The only rule, other than eligibility requirements and the ubiquitous call for no spam, is that "your blog must contain unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about," according to the site. The winner of the scholarship will be announced at the end of October and awarded at the Blog World and New Media Expo in Las Vegas in November.

Marc Canter's company Broadband Mechanics, who I work part-time for, is releasing People Aggregator at Gnomedex. So all the BBM team is gathering for that. Also over the next couple of weeks I'll be talking up another project of mine, called Micro Media Corporation. It's a corporate blogging and podcasting program run by London-based The Rights Marketing Company, along with myself. More on that in an upcoming post, because we're looking for more blogging and/or podcasting contributers (and yes it pays!).

So it'll be a busy time. And of course I'm really looking forward to catching up with all my Silicon Valley buddies. As for Read/WriteWeb and my ZDNet blog, watch out for a lot of conference live-blogging and special interviews!

"For sixty or seventy years in the nineteenth century the novel in Europe, developing very fast in the hands of a relay of masters, became an extraordinary tool. It did what no other literary form - essay, poem, drama, history - could do. It gave industrial or industrializing or modern society a very clear idea of itself. It showed with immediacy what hadn't been shown before; and it altered vision. Certain things in the form could be modified or played with later, but the pattern of the modern novel had been set, and its program laid out.

All of us who have come after have been derivative. We can never be the first again[....]They are the first; they didn't know it when they began, but then they do know, and they are full of excitement at the discovery. That excitement comes over to us, and there is an unrepeatable energy in the writing."

Naipaul went on to say that there is "an air of discovery" about 19th century novel writing, that disappeared when the "originators" burned themselves out. In the 20th century, cinema was the new "universal art" according to Naipaul. I'd like to go a step further and state here that blogging is the 21st century's universal art. From my PC in New Zealand, I feel as if I discover a new idea every day reading weblogs. And, to paraphrase The Carpenters, weblogging has only just begun!

Blogging is on the cusp of becoming mainstream, like the novel did during the 19th century. Witness what is happening within US politics. One of the leading Presidential candidates, Howard Dean, has tapped into blogging as a way to garner votes. Dave Winer and Lawrence Lessig amongst others are exploring this significant new path for blogging.

Yes my fellow bloggers, it's an exciting era to live in. Aren't you glad you're an Originator? ;-)