MySoreHead

I discussed in my previous post Aggregation Groups and WordPressMU, I share how we are using groups and categories to aggregate content in present it rich ways, celebrating community and diversity.

Structured blogging suggest even more useful and powerful ways in which additional meta data can be attached to a blog post.

Consider an excursion to CERES that our students might attend as art of their study of Cultures of the Commonwealth. Currently, on returning from the excursion a student would write a single blog post about the excursion and the learning associated with it. Meta data describing the content of the post is attached by user (group memberships), date posted, categories used (Cultures of the Commonwealth) and tags (CERES, excursions).

What other meta data is missing?

We know when the post was written but we don't know when the excursion occurred, it may be written in the post but that is no help to us in trying to aggregate or mash-up in other meaningful ways. We don't know who went on the excursion (besides the author), although writing about a place and using its agreed tag doesn't mean you've been there. We don't know where CERES is?

Structured blogging, an "open standard" to build machine readable content that other services understand. The now defunct PubSub formed partnerships with many companies to embed structured machine readable content into blog posts and released plugins for WordPress and TypePad blogging systems. There were the broad categories of reviews, events, lists, people, audio, video with each category having a separate specific form. For example, book reviews, movie reviews, restaraunt reviews, and so on. The different forms have drop down lists of mandatory data, our excursion above would've been an event, with a date and time, a location, a purpose and with attendees.

Structured blogging in the format that it was released was too cumbersome and didn't offer bloggers any incentive to use the system. Ultimately, the companies search, presumably based on similar technologies failed to gain traction, and the company folded. It could be argued that school's and students have a greater need for the benefits of a structured blogging system and teachers could require it to be used.

The simplified Vox blogging model is along similar lines and is very popular. It gives the blogger the choice of regular posts, photo posts, audio posts and video posts. Yet it doesn't have events or locations.

Maybe a compromise with teacher added events available as a drop down list somewhere in the writing dashboard.