Structured Blogging is going to be important
Bob Wyman has made a great post articulating the business implications of structured blogging, and prospective search.
I have been digesting this one for a few days now, and there’s a lot to grasp, but the potential is tantalizing. A couple of thoughts spring to mind…
- Where does FOAF fit in?
- I’ve said before that I think Ping-O-Matic is valuable as a central clearing house for prospective search engines. I wonder if this takes on new significance in the context of commerce and prospective search.
- To call it ’structured blogging’ is a bit misleading, cause it isn’t about blogging per se…it sits well with blogs, but its more about structured data regardless of blogs (as CMSs) or blogging (as a communications channel). eg. No reason why the news web site couldn’t get in on the act by structuring their online classified listings in this way.
Anyway, this stuff is going to be important, although it is fair to say we’re a ways from standards at this time. Phil Pearson has a good summary of the various nascent efforts (via).
May 17th, 2005 at 7:41 pm
Hi Charles,
The idea of well structured blogs (structured data in general, as you say) is not a new one, and has been around since at least 2002, when folks building blogs started to realize that headings should be surrounded by heading tags rather than bold tags, and paragraphs should be surrounded by p tags rather than broken up with pairs of br tags, etc. Search for “bed and breakfast markup†for more details.
When looking at different ways of building structured blogs and web pages, something to beware of are the flaws with an approach that duplicates data. Essentially, duplicate data introduces an unnecessary level of complexity and fragility. When the user goes back to edit the post, or uses an XML-RPC client (not a plugin), such duplicated data will inevitably get out of sync. Not too unlike the problem of meta keywords getting out of sync with the contents of a page.
An alternative to duplicating the data is the whole notion of microformats - that blog authors are already authoring most of the info necessary for this structured data, and that it’s trivial to add just a bit of markup (a microformat) around *existing data* so that aggregators etc. can recognize it.
http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/MicroFormats
Since I see you are in New Zealand, here is a concrete example that you may find interesting:
http://coffee.gen.nz/
This site uses hReview (one of several microformats) to publish reviews of cafes in Christchurch and Wellington.
Take a look and let me know what you think of microformats and hReview.
http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReview
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thanks,
Tantek
May 18th, 2005 at 2:01 pm
Thanks for the comment Tantek.
I need some more time to digest this, but at first glance I really like the MicroFormats approach…as Phil Pearson noted, it seems easy to implement.
Wordpress supports XFN today…would be cool if support for MicroFormats was baked into the next version.
Cheers