Joe Reger has posted a note linking to an astounding demo that clearly shows one of the most exciting elements in blogging's future. Today, blogs are limited primarily to unstructured text. In the future, I think we'll see blogs used to publish structured data as well. Instead of going to a walled garden site to publish notices of things you'd like to sell, reviews of books you've read, or your resume, what you'll be able to do is just publish those "offers-to-sell", reviews, etc. on your own blog or website and then have the search and matching services pull in your data the same way that services pull in HTML pages and RSS/Atom feeds today. We'll see that blogs, incorporating structured publishing ideas like those that Joe demonstrates, will become the most important tools in chipping away at the Grey Web and revealing in a more useful way the vast stores of data that are currently hidden in the web today.
Joe has been developing his "DataBlogging" idea for years and recently we've been working together with a group of other folk to combine the best of his ideas with the best of the ideas from StructuredBlogging, semantic web formats, and microformats. All of these ideas and proposals have the same basic "Web 2.0" theme: Make it easier for computers to process the data on the web by publishing that data in formats which are easily parsed and manipulated.
I'm looking forward to seeing Joe's demo evolve into production code and am excited by the prospects of continuing to work with him on these ideas. I sincerely hope that other blog software developers will see the wisdom in what's being done here and the exciting opportunities that structured publishing will create for us all.
bob wyman
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