WebProNews

There are ways of making the randomness of blog entries less so, and a panel at the Syndicate Conference discussed the ways of making one's blog more accessible to readers.

Gus Spathis, PubSub's CEO, defined structured blogging as a way of embedding hints about blog posts. When those posts are published, machines can understand them.

The Structured Blogging website contains plug-ins for Wordpress and Movable Type, two popular blogging platforms.

"The structured blogging programs create really great looking posts," said Stathis. "Behind the page the information is encoded in such a way that its relatively simple to extract that information and leverages it somehow"

"Without structured blogging it will take some pretty sophisticated algorithms to tell what a page is about," he said.

Now that there is a way to create structured blog posts, the next steps could include the development of applications to leverage this embedded semantic content, and the rise of specialized aggregators around this information.

Chad Dickerson of Yahoo said, "When blogging first became popular and started taking hold I thought of it as a lightweight content management system."

Now with the rise of structured blogging and micro-formats this is becoming even more the case. Yahoo's latest service, Yahoo! Tech, uses structured data. Viewing the source for the site shows how Yahoo is using it.

"Getting started on micro-formats is kind of a 'do it' - view source kind of thing," he said. "It would be foolish of us to publish things in micro-format and not let other people use it."

- WebProNews editor Mike McDonald commented in a note to us that these efforts are all about content organization. In recapping the session, he said the ability to easily classify this information become extremely important, when one is in an environment where anybody anywhere is apt to be writing about anything at anytime.

---

Add to document.write("Del.icio.us") | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web | Furl It

Bookmark WebProNews -

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.