Structured blogging
Whether we are aware or not, that’s where we are heading in the near future. The last decade saw the ability to populate the internet with content, going on to presentation, markup, standardization and validation. In this one, we’re seeing more and more methodologies to categorize, segregate and structure information for better use, better business and better archiving.
Charlene Li finds out about structured blogging from the PubSub chief, and this makes a lot of sense to me.
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).
Many have this doubt about why they should follow things like semantic markup and validation. The simple answer is that it’s a first step towards making your own content more visible, simply put, not just to browsers, but any software, application or device that can read it, categorize it and do amazing stuff with it.
How does this matter to you? Better exposure, wider audience, more customers, more vertical info for research, the works. If you read what Structuredblogging has to say about the concept, you may just extend it to any imaginable subject and imagine its benefits. Every business imaginable has use for this kind of thing.
Someone recently said that I’m listening too much into validation police. Am I really? To them, I’d say you’ve been too shortsighted not to see the importance of structured information and importance of validation. What does validation ensure? It makes a compliant device or a piece of software not just read your stuff correctly, but also do things to your content in the way you wrote it and served it on the web, not to mention better exposure, wider audience, blah, blah. So, if you value what you write, then taking pains to ensure its validation is an investment. Someday you’ll live to see how beneficial it would be to you and others.
Flickr wouldn’t be as great without tagging, right? Validation and structure mostly has made the online experience better. I agree.
Jun 15, 05 at 15:32Patrix: Flickr has another thing to its benefit for interplay: the APIs. Ditto with BBC with Backstage. They’re all providing a method to stream their raw content to better utilize the info they provide in a relevant and appropriate way.
Jun 16, 05 at 01:20