The Structured Blogging website has
been upgraded and went live tonight. I re-designed the website and did the writing for
it, under the employ of Marc Canter’s Broadband Mechanics and with the help of
others in the Structured Blogging community such as Conor O’Neill. PubSub supplied the stylesheets and php code. Indeed
PubSub and BBM are the driving forces behind Structured Blogging, but it really is an
open source project at its heart.
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.
