Marc Canter is on stage to announce the launch of StructuredBlogging.org, a non-profit initiative supporting the development and deployment of micro-formats in blog posts. The idea is pretty simple (but the implementation across all industry players is far from easy): as opposed to publishing a review of say, a movie, in a text format, a micro-format defines a number of fields that can be entered related to the movie: title, producer, director, actors, etc. Having information available in XML will make it much easier to intelligently extract elements of data to search, aggregate and syndicate. Specific plugins have been developed for WordPress and MovableType to make it easy to publish these formats through a blog. There are a couple of examples on the StructuredBlogging blog.
Salim Ismail from PubSub is now providing the list of formats currently supported: Reviews, Events, Lists, Media (audio, video, images), and People and Group showcases. The corresponding micro-formats will also be mapped to existing file formats like FOAF, vCard, iCal,… About 40 companies are supporting this initiatives at launch, and a much larger number is expected to jump on the bandwagon.
Mike Arrington from TechCrunch fame, and also Edgeio – the stealth project he and Keith Teare have been working on – briefly mentioned that supporting a forthcoming Classifieds micro-format will be part of the roadmap of the company. I should use this occasion to disclose that I am also involved in Edgeio – more on all this later.
This is a positive development for the industry, eventually pushing blogging into richer types of applications – and enabling new types of aggregation. I just wish that we won’t see competing initiatives developing just for the sake of building something proprietary. This is an open source initiative, and everyone is welcome to participate.
Update: PubSub’s Bob Wyman posts some thoughts about Structured Blogging, and mentions the existence of a discussion group.
Tags: structuredblogging, syndicate