You've probably heard the question: "But, will it play in Peoria?"... Well, Structured Blogging does, in fact, "Play in Peoria!". On the Peoria Pundit blog written by Bill Dennis, you'll find Structured Blogging being used to announce "events" -- A city council meeting on Tuesday and the City Council's Legislative breakfast on Monday. A number of previous SB "event" announcements covered things like Free Mammogram screenings around Peoria. I'm not sure what other sources there are for these event announcements, however, it is obvious that it would be valuable for search engines and event services to look for event notices like these and use their structure to build enhanced indexing systems that would help people more easily find or discover these important notices. It is also important to see that by using the Structured Blogging extensions, the announcement entries are much more visually appealing and easier to read than they would have been if just simple text had been used.
For other uses of Structured Blogging, check out Incredibooks.com which is filled with structured book reviews written by teens. Or, a review of the King Kong movie on Dykstranet.com. A very brief, but pretty, review of Madonna's latest can be found on dev.dramaking.de. A Virginia site has a review of a recent gallery show. Many movie reviews can be found on the "Blogging by Martin" site in Sweden... (Martin has clearly modified the standard templates to make them fit his own aesthetic. It is also clear that he spends too much time watching movies...)
I was able to find these things since I've got a PubSub subscription that looks for all items that contain a reference to the namespace which flags one of the formats that the Structured Blogging extensions support. (The PubSub subscription looks like: URI:structuredblogging.org/xmlns). Similar methods can be used with PubSub or various search engines to find content that is structured using other formats.
It's great to see that people are doing Structured Blogging. Clearly, people wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't easy to do and worth the trouble... My guess is that the people who have suggested that Structured Blogging is too hard (like Paul Kedrosky) will be proved wrong. It may be too hard for some very lazy folk, but it's apparently easy enough for quite a few others -- and we'll be making it easier in the future...
bob wyman
Thanks for the plug. I have a question about how to use Structured Blogging for classified ads. Namely, how do you use Structured Blogging for classified Ads? Any tutorials or examples I can use?
Posted by: Bill Dennis | December 17, 2005 at 20:34