Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that - formatting blog entries around their content.

To see what we’re talking about, check out the sample content on the blog.

On another level, it’s a bit more complicated - what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers - other programs, sites, and aggregators - better understand the content.

Background

The sudden explosion of blogs has given rise to a number of new tools - aggregators, search engines, matching engines - many of which were made possible by syndicated feeds. Put simply, the availability of lots of XML on the web allowed the creation of new systems for processing information.

We believe that syndicated feeds - RSS, RDF, and Atom - are just the start. We believe that if more information could be structured, a whole new set of tools and concepts could be created.

The lesson we learned from blogging was that structured content and XML would be created, provided that the interface was simple enough and there was some value to the user creating the content. Blogs represent an easy-to-use publishing system, and one in which syndication offers value - the ability to reach wide audiences through aggregators, or paste into websites, and so on.

We believe that it will be possible to meet the same requirements - ease of use and added value - in creating syndicated formats for many different content types. We can provide mechanisms for creating content, reading content, and embedding content in both XML and HTML. We can do this transparently, so ordinary blog readers and writers won’t even notice the difference. And we can do this within existing content systems, without breaking RSS, RDF or Atom (we can even create a system for mapping structure to RDF, and back).

What’s in it for me?

Most people don’t care about structure, or internal formats. One of the keys to structured blogging is that it lets you format specific content types - as we said, so movie reviews don’t look like calendar entries.

Using structured blogging means it’s easy to create, edit, and maintain these different kinds of posts. In fact, for most purposes, structured blogging won’t really seem like a big deal at all - it’s just another edit form on your blog. The difference is that the structure will let you add specific styles to each type, add links and pictures for reviews, and so on.

Once structured blogging is in place, you can start building applications on top of it. Because it’s an XML format and embedded in both the HTML blog and the syndicated feed, applications can run in web browsers (like a firefox plugin for comparison shopping which reads product reviews); aggregators (like an aggregator that adds your friend’s calendar entries to your datebook); or web services (like a feed for everyone who’s attending the same conference as you).

Since structured blogging is completely open, anyone can build applications or services based on the structure in each entry.

Implementation

To start, we’ve created a plugin for Wordpress 1.5 that makes it easy to write structured blog entries. If you have Wordpress installed and you want to try it, click on the download link to the right.

We want to use the Wordpress plugin to test the system and get some feedback. Once we’re comfortable with this, we plan on creating an Atom API publisher that will work with other systems.

In the meantime, if you have any questions, comments, or feedback, please send us a note at feedback@structuredblogging.org.