Tiffany B. Brown

a mish-mosh of stuff

Structured blogging

I mentioned this briefly in the Atlanta PHP May meeting post. Structured blogging is an intiative to provide a standard format for blogging about particular forms of content. The idea is to make it easier to share particular bits of microcontent by publishing it in a consistent form.

The Structured Blogging team has developed plugins for MovableType and WordPress help bloggers in publish structured content. Formats include reviews for albums, books, hotels, audio and video files, people, and groups. Installing the structured blogging plug-in, for example, adds links for publishing list, events, reviews and interviews.

Structured blogging screen shot
Structured blogging - Audio file interface
Top image is the Write panel. Bottom image is the audio file panel.

Structured blogging takes advantage of microformats. Microformats are a quick-and-dirty way to give semantic meaning to XHTML documents by using elements and attributes. For example, the hCard format uses divs and spans with pre-defined classes to capture and display business card information. The data has a standardized format for machine readability, and also maintains human readability.

I’ll be experimenting with structured blogging for events and reviews.

So far, I like the concept, but I’m not swayed by the tool: the WordPress structured blogging plugin produces invalid XHTML code for some content forms. But that’s certainly an easy fix.

Will structured blogging catch on? My hope is yes. And I also hope we see more services like Edgeio that aggregate structured forms of content, and Output This! which makes one-post-to-many-blogs publishing a snap.

  • http://www.pubsub.com/ Steven M. Cohen

    Hi Tiffany:

    Thanks for your post about Structured Blogging. We are hopeful that more and more bloggers start to use the plug-ins.

    As far as your mention of invalid XHTML code, I’m going to send the information to the Structured Blogging mailing list. If you would like to join in on the discussion, you can sign up here (http://mail.structuredblogging.org/mailman/listinfo/structuredblogging-discuss/).

    Regards,

    Steven M. Cohen
    PubSub Concepts, Inc
    scohen@pubsub.com

  • http://www.pubsub.com Steven M. Cohen

    Hi Tiffany:

    Thanks for your post about Structured Blogging. We are hopeful that more and more bloggers start to use the plug-ins.

    As far as your mention of invalid XHTML code, I’m going to send the information to the Structured Blogging mailing list. If you would like to join in on the discussion, you can sign up here (http://mail.structuredblogging.org/mailman/listinfo/structuredblogging-discuss/).

    Regards,

    Steven M. Cohen
    PubSub Concepts, Inc
    scohen@pubsub.com

  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com/ Rashid Z. Muhammad

    Interesting. This could do wonders for creating communal blogs.

    Right now I’m writing an experimental RSS aggregator, and my biggest problem with RSS and ATOM (well, actually just ATOM at this point) is that there are still so many divergent publishing implementations.

    I thought that eliminating this type of thing was the freaking purpose of these specifications!!

    Silly me…

  • http://www.rashidmuhammad.com Rashid Z. Muhammad

    Interesting. This could do wonders for creating communal blogs.

    Right now I’m writing an experimental RSS aggregator, and my biggest problem with RSS and ATOM (well, actually just ATOM at this point) is that there are still so many divergent publishing implementations.

    I thought that eliminating this type of thing was the freaking purpose of these specifications!!

    Silly me…