Structured Blogging Initiative brings Microcontent to the Masses

For the past couple months I've been working on a project with Broadband Mechanics and PubSub Concepts to build out a new version of the Structured Blogging system. Well, today was the big announcement of the new Structured Blogging Initiative at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco. It's also the release of the first version of new Structured Blogging plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type.

The Structured Blogging value proposition from the web site.

Structured Blogging will make it easy to create, edit and maintain different kinds of blog posts. The major difference is the structure will let you add specific styles to each type. For example, you'll be able to add links and pictures to spruce up your movie reviews. They will look completely different from, say, your calendar entries. Better yet, someone looking for a review of the movie Titanic will be likely to find your post about it. Structured Blogging gives you a bigger megaphone; a taller soapbox from which to be heard and to grow a bigger audience. Once Structured Blogging is in place, you can start building applications on top of it. Because Structured Blogging plugings embed information in both the HTML blog and the syndicated feed, applications can run in web browsers (like a Firefox plugin for comparison shopping which also reads product reviews); aggregators (such as one that adds your friend's calendar entries to your date book); or web services (like a feed for everyone who is attending the same conference as you). Structured Blogging plugins have been designed to support open formats as new schemas emerge from community usage, the tools allow anyone to build applications or services based on the structure in each entry.

On a personal note, this has obvious tie ins with my work on Syncato and now brings some of the concepts I talked about in my article on Microcontent Management with Syncato to users of the popular Wordpress and Movable Type systems.

However, for me, the real gem in this release isn't necessarily the plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type, but rather the Microcontent engine that is the heart of the plugins. The engine is an Open Source library available in PHP and Perl that interprets something called a Microcontent Description (MCD) into something usable by humans. MCD is a simple user interface description language that describes how to edit and view a particular piece of XML microcontent. This allows you to publish a tool to create and view a piece of structured data by simply describing the interface in an XML file. This also allows the integration with other blogging systems or the construction of tools that don't run inside of a blogging system at all. I'll be posting much more about this in the coming days to better explain what this really means.

Another technical note on these new plugins is that they support the Broadband Mechanics Outputthis.org service. Outputthis basically acts as a router for blog data to send it from one source to many. As an example, the Rhapsody review I wrote last night was actually written using the Structured Blogging plugin running within Wordpress and simultaneously published to Wordpress and my public site running on Syncato. This service is currently very alpha, but will probably prove quite useful as it matures and it becomes increasingly common to want to target your content to multiple sources.

Posted by Kimbro Staken