Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

The new structured blogging initiative is interesting and could be important. It establishes simple data standards for some typical types of things blogger blog about: Reviews, events, media, etc.

These types of metadata effort have the same basic dynamics: If they were widely adopted, there would be tremendous system-wide benefits — e.g., computers would be able to find, aggregate and normalize reviews of local restaurants because the phone number fields and ratings fields would be identifiable, etc. But, people don't adopt metadata standards all that readily, despite the potential benefits. So, the success of structured blogging depends on how easy it is for bloggers and how appealing the benefits are.

Right now, the plug-ins are in beta Do not attempt installing them unless you are unalarmed by instructions such as "mkdir -m 777 ../sbimages" and "You will also want to edit your RSS 2.0 Index and change the<$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$> ." It's pretty straightforward but, at this point (in beta), definitely for early adopters.