Structured Blogging

There’s a new wordpress plugin called Structured Blogging that I’m checking out, and that might be interesting to a few of you out there (esp. the librarians). The basic concept is explained on the site Structured Blogging…here’s an excerpt:

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).

So, effectively, it’s a way of wrapping XML Metadata around the content of blog posts in specific ways that relate to the content of the posts. Review posts will have fields that are common to reviews, and can then be manipulated in specific ways by aggregators/datamining that wouldn’t be possible previously. It’s a really interesting idea, and I’d been searching for ways to incorporate something like this in my blog. Rather than having a “currently reading” sidebar, including my current reads inline with the rest of the blog, thus maintaining the calendar of my reading for myself, and putting it into the metadata of my blog for future perusal.

I’m gonna try a “Review” post next just to see what it looks like, but this could be a great, great tool for specific types of blogs (Jackson has been doing a series of reviews on his blog…this would be perfect for that).