I've been pleased to see that the relaunch of Structured Blogging has been almost universally well received. However, I'm very puzzled by a number of folk who seem to be trying to find some kind of competition between Structured Blogging and "microformats." The reality is that Structured Blogging is a thing you do and is independent of formats. On the other hand, "microformats" is, as it's name implies, simply one of many approachs to defining the under-the-covers formats that are used by people who are doing Structured Blogging. The two concepts are orthogonal. They don't compete. They can't compete. Verbs don't compete with nouns.
The benefits that will come when people insert more metadata, tags, etc. in their web publications are clear to most people and have been for a very long time. Tim Berners-Lee has been exciting people with his dream of a "semantic web" for a very long time. More recently, the supporters of the "microformats" approach have also been generating a great deal of excitement about the idea while using a different kind of format from the RDF championed by Berners-Lee. However, all previous efforts have been focused on the techie format issues and haven't really addressed the practical needs of those who are expected to use the formats. The real issue here isn't what formats are being used. The real issue is making this form of publishing and writing usable by real people. That is why the "Structured Blogging" effort focuses not on formats but rather on delivering to publishers immediate benefits from using the approach and the tools they need to do it. Our Structured Blogging extensions provide users with new blog entry formatting options and we take the pain out of using formats by implementing easy to use forms for the entry of structured data. This is vastly superior to asking people to hand-edit RDF structures or hand-insert "microformat" tags into the XHTML of their pages...
If anyone doubts the independence of Structured Blogging from format issues, they should note that the Structured Blogging extensions to Wordpress and Moveable Type actually support a broad range of microformats and, as extendable, open-source tools, they can be and will be extended to support more. My personal feeling is that the advocates the microformat formats should be welcoming what we've done as one of the most compelling and useful implementations of microformats. The adherents to microformats should be taking what we've done (it's open-source) and extending it to support more microformats if they think we've overlooked something.
We now have well built, easily used, open-source extensions to two of the major blogging platforms that will make it very, very easy for users to generate structured content that contains microformats or RDF or embedded XML or OPML, or whatever formats win in the marketplace. And, we've got something like 40 builders of other tools and services that have been motivated by the existence of these tools to rededicate themselves to supporting the use of structured data -- in many cases microformats -- in what they do.
When getting the present effort started, I chose to use the name "Structured Blogging" with some care in order to avoid precisely the kind of format-war competition that some are currently suggesting might exist. Seb Paquet had written a number of posts some years ago talking about the benefits that would result if people were to do "Structured Blogging" and since he had already laid a conceptual groundwork for the idea and the name, I thought it best to hang our efforts on that name rather than to come up with something new -- especially something that was focused on a particular kind of tagging, data structure, or format. In chosing the name, what I was trying to do was emphasize what people DO, not which formats they use. Frankly, getting people to "DO" structured publishing is vastly more important than anything related to formats. No matter how elegant someone might think any particular format may be, if folk don't DO Structured Blogging, if they don't use the formats, then the formats just don't matter. Hopefully, the doubters will come to see and appreciate this distinction and we can all get back to making the dream happen. Making the dream happen will depend on whether or not we can build useful tools to support users who want to DO what we're proposing. Aesthetc battles over formats don't help anyone.
bob wyman
Bob, what do you think of Paul Kedrosky's recent post, "Structured Blogging Will Flop"?
http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/002215.html
Posted by: Greg Linden | December 15, 2005 at 13:10