Adding Structure to you Blog

Over the last couple of days the blogsphere has been a mumble with the launch of the structured blogging initiative so being the sucker for the latest trend I have installed the plugin here.

The main idea behind structured blogging is to add more meaning to your blog posts, so that when you write a review of something like a movie it can be easily indexed and searched by machines. There is loads more info on the real benefits over on the website structuredblogging.org.

It’s nice in a way, allowing you to format your review or event or audio content but in the end it’s just a little to structured for my tastes. You have to spend a while filling in boxes and selecting options and then it formats it all in a fixed way for all you posts. I think that a lot of people don’t want to go to that extra effort. They don’t want to be limited in that way, fixed in boxes for their creative content.

So I have a mental model of the alternative. It’s a standard blog editing window but it’s interactive. I can write my review as I want to with fixed structure or forced fields. Then I can start to structure it. Select a chunk of text and mark it as a movie review with a button at the side of the page. Then a new set of buttons appears and I can do things like select the words “5 out of 10″ or “3 stars” and mark it as a rating. Select the actors name and mark it as such. In that way I still have my simple creative area and the structure is still there for integration with other systems.

The only downside that I can find with this is the integration that is already in type in a movie name in the current movie review box and click the search icon and all the other fields will be filled in for you. So the correct information will be there for you to look over.

But in the end all I should have to do is point my post to the URI of the film or restaurant and all the other information should be sorted for me, there is no need for me to mark up actors or add an address as that will all be stored at their site. I just write my review and only need to mark up new information that I have added. Then my site should pull in all the relevant info dynamically to create a page for my users to view.