Structured Blogging is Happening
My buddy Paul Kedrosky recently wrote that Structured Blogging Will Flop. His reasons:
It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:
- People are lazy
- People are lazy
- People are lazy
I agree people are lazy. I know. I’m lazy. So is Paul. He is so lazy that he uses the same point three times in a row. I am a supporter of structured blogging. To counter, each of my points will be different, and I will even up the ante with a fourth:
- Existing structures
- Real time web
- Machine RSS
- Spam issues
1. Existing structures. Lots of bloggers categorize and tag their content today. People are already taking the time to add semantics. Blogging tools strive to differentiate themselves, and will add tools to make it easy to add structured blogging to their post, just like it is easy to tag and categorize. (btw: Paul, when are you moving to WordPress?) Since I am lazy, I would prefer to create a post about a public event so that it gets promoted by event tracking systems like Eventful, rather then run around and promote it myself.
2. Real time web. As the web gets bigger, and the cycle time of polling all the pages by the search engines gets longer, the relevancy of a search drops. The data in an RSS feed, or in the future, in a Ping, will be more relevant then data on a web page. If the data is structured, it will be even more relevant
3. Machine RSS. Lots of interesting feeds are not generated by humans. It is easy for machines to endlessly add the same structure tags to data that already has structure. With the rise of the real time web, publishers of data will look to move their data out so that it is easily found, just like people have been doing search engine optimization for years.
4. Spam issues. One kind of structure that is needed is the identity of the blog. 75% of new pings are spings (splogs). Splogs and spings are degrading the value of the real time web. Efforts are under way to resolve this problem, and hopefully we have all learned from our ant-spam experiences on how to do this right.
Structured blogging will not solve world hunger. It will likely look somewhat different from what the existing structured blogging effort, and I am sure there was more hype, then beef at Syndicate about this, but let’s not be lazy and dismiss it out of hand.
Sun Dec 18, 2005 at 5:11 PM infrastructure« Lazyness, messiness and structureDick Hardt refutes Paul KedrovskyHere’s what Dick Hardt had to say to Paul K:My buddy Paul Kedrosky recently wrote that Structured Blogging Will …
Trackback by Anonymous — December 18, 2005 @ 5:11 pm
Paul is right, people are lazy, which is why some version of structured blogging is most likely.
Most web content is accessed via searching. People will focus on the first few results, which would promote structured content over its lesser bretheren. People, who are by definition lazy, would demand structure to minimize the search effort.
Bloggers are people and, as we have determined, are lazy. But they are blogging, which one assumes points to them being slightly less lazy than other people. Their content is there to be found and read. Adding structure that will elevate it to the attention of the interested masses seems like little extra effort in comparision to maintaining a blog. This lesser effort is needed to that ensure the greater enterprise isn’t wasted.
And isn’t laziness all about the minimization of effort?
Comment by AndyC — December 18, 2005 @ 9:58 pm
Great post Dick and thanks for the support of structured blogging.
Comment by Gus Spathis — December 19, 2005 @ 7:11 am
Sat Dec 31, 2005 at 2:18 PM Structured blogging Belated congratulations to the Structured Blogging folks on their announcement this month and all the buzz. I think this is… http://www.r21online.com/archives/000698.html
Trackback by Anonymous — December 31, 2005 @ 2:18 pm
i agree that writing off structured blogging because people are lazy doesn’t seem legit. people do already put a bit of thought into adding semantics to their posts, even if it’s only to get a good spot on technorati or something like that. tagging is goofy and flawed like meta-keywords used to be… any initiative to make the content on the internet better structured in a way that can be consumed by automated systems is a good idea in my opinion. all it needs is support, and it looks like this structured blogging thing may in fact fly…it’ll be a good thing, another step in the right direction, but not the end all beat all by any means…
Comment by Jordan Frank — January 5, 2006 @ 9:05 pm
I would like to communicate with Sxip and Sxore people re partnership oppts, how do I do that?
Comment by interpnexus — January 7, 2006 @ 2:53 pm
Email us! Email me! dick at sxip dot com …
Comment by Dick — January 9, 2006 @ 3:37 pm
I tend to agree laziness is the wrong answer to the wrong question. are flickr users lazy? delicious users? technorati users? heck no. people are increasingly tuned into declarative living, and that means metadata creation by the back door. if it were canonical that might be an issue, but structured blogging is going to be major, imho
Comment by James Governor — January 24, 2006 @ 5:29 am
It intersring and very excyting
Comment by jherd — February 2, 2006 @ 6:09 am