First of all, what is Structured Blogging? Right now, blog posts are physically just free-form text entries in plain english paragraphs. But logically speaking, a blog post might be a movie review, an editorial on a recent news bit, description of an upcoming event, etc. While plain old english prose is the optimal mode of comprehension for us humans, machines have a tough time figuring out what the heck you’re talking about unless the content of the entry is tagged or categorized in some way. Structured Blogging is all about incorporating microformats into blog posts in order to structure (aka. tag, but not tagging in the folksonomy sense but tagging in the tagged-data xml sense). Basically, let’s say I posted

“I saw Syriana last night and it was thrilling and though-provoking. Go see it this weekend.”

From these two sentences, you likely had no problem understanding that:
1) Syriana is a movie currently in theaters.
2) I saw Syriana and my review of it is: “thrilling and though-provoking”
3) I am recommending people to go see it.

For a machine to correctly recognize these exact two sentences as a review for a movie named Syriana is difficult. Furthermore, for the machine to find meaning in what I wrote is another problem in itself. Instead, if I published my post using the hReview microformat, a machine could easily recognize that my post is a review for an item - in this case this item is a movie named Syriana - and know what exactly my review is of the item - “thrilling and though-provoking”. Structured Blogging has partnered (it’s not clear how deep these partnerships really are) with all the major blogging tool companies to presumably integrate these formats into the popular blogging software so that the blogger need not know the exact syntax and tags of each format. Tagging your movie review post with the hReview format shouldn’t be more then a click of a few buttons.

Will bloggers use this? Let’s take a minute to understand the motivation of the blogger.

Currently bloggers publish their blogs as a medium for building and expressing their self identity on the Web. When you write something on your blog, it stays with you in one centralized place and becomes part of your e-identity. If I write a product review on Amazon, sure it will get read (in fact it would probably get way more readership than it would on my blog) but that’s not the point. I’m sort of giving away my content. The world doesn’t know who I am on Amazon. Right now, people’s online identities are so fragmented. Pieces of their online expression are happening on many different sites. They might publish some product reviews on Amazon, list some items for sale on Craiglist or eBay, write movie reviews on IMDB, regularly comment on news items on various blogs, chat on various message boards… the list goes on. Sure, all these forms of expression come from me, but because they are completely decentralized they do not form any sort of identity for me. Someone reading my Amazon review of a DVD I bought has no idea about the movie reviews that I’ve written on IMDB. Without a doubt, the ability to keep the content I create on the Web in one spot, published in the way I want is compelling. But blogging already offers this. Why do I need to adopt structured blogging?

The reason is so others can better find the content I produce. If someone is searching or reviews on Syriana, if I have properly tagged my review as such, then there’s a higher chance that a user will find my review. The reason is that the aggregators of the future, while sucking up my blog content, will be able to recognize and precisely record my post as a Syriana movie review. Without this tagging, the only way my content will be located is by search relevancy for the term ‘Syriana’. That’s pretty much hopeless. Besides, someone searching for ‘Syriana review’ won’t even be likely to be given my blog post because I didn’t even put the word ‘review’ anywhere in it. Okay, so if I use Structured Blogging, people will be able to better find my content. Sweet! Well it’s not really that perfect.

These aggregators of the future are going to want to aggregate the content they suck up. You can imagine a movie review aggregator that sucks up all the reviews in the blogosphere, and provides an uber MetaCritic. So users looking for reviews for Syriana will conveniently see “average 4 star rating based on 35 bloggers”. And then of course this aggregator will have advertising and sell movie tickets and essentially be making money off of my and others’ reviews. Is this aggregator compensating me? Nope. They’re just leeching my content and making a buck. The only thing the aggregator can possibly offer me is increased traffic if, in this case, the user wanted to actually read individual reviews of the movie. Is this a fair tradeoff? If I am posting something like a classified ad where it absolutely benefits me to increase its visibility, then there is real monetary value in it for me then the answer is yes. For other situations, the answer becomes tricky. Note: This discussion is very similar to the relationsihp between web publishers and web search engines.

Finally, this topic of structuring content was in the news recently thanks to our friends at Google. A few weeks back GoogleBase launched. Read my post about it. The concept with GoogleBase is very similar: Structure data so that it can be better aggregated. Right now, the only way to input into GoogleBase is directly via a web form (they have different forms for different data types) or via a feed. Either way its the content creator actively submitting it to Google. But, if structured blogging takes off, doesn’t it make a lot of sense for GoogleBase to suck up structured content from the blogosphere? Sure. If there’s structured content anywhere out on the Web, it makes tons of sense for Google to go fetch it. The problem is that right now there is little, if any.