Structured Blogging Concept Shot Down

[dutter]

The short time it took for the idea of structured blogging to be brought back to Earth makes the 18-month timeframe of Moore's Law look like a glacial epoch.

We covered Structured Blogging after Marc Canter announced the Structured Blogging Initiative at the recent Syndicate Conference in San Francisco. The idea would have bloggers take an approach to blogging that makes their posts easier to navigate and sort. Canter told WebProNews they would be shipping plug-in code for blogging platforms Moveable Type and WordPress.

The Structured Blogging site tells more about how its concept can make blogging more useful. With a structure in place, anyone can build an application or a service to draw from a blog post:

Using Structured Blogging, job listings can be created, posted, searched, and found by any service; buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services.

It only took a few hours to pass for Paul Kederosky to treat Structured Blogging like a mallard flying too slow over a duck blind. He summarizes in three points why the extra effort needed for Structured Blogging won't happen:

1. People are lazy
2. People are lazy
3. People are lazy

To Kederosky, intelligence "belongs in the network and in the algorithms." People aren't going to be bothered to pull up that extra form depending on the content they want to post.

Commentors on Kederosky's blog offered various views supporting his comments or defending the Structured Blogging approach. Performancing's Nick Wilson wrote "(T)hey're all so busy congratulating each other on how clever they are that they fail to grasp some of the most fundamental points about people and technology entirely."

PubSub co-founder Salim Ismail defended the concept in his reply: "There are three key benefits for users: 1) it looks nicer, 2) it'll get found more easily, and 3) they retain ownership of the data."

A comment by Blogaholics' Arieanna that "Structure will reduce my creativity" got a clever response from Hashim Warren: "That's not true for everyone. Haikus have a strict structure yet they actually breed creativity, not hinder it."

[Scott Adie]

Structured blogging may yet have a place. People aren't Lazy, Lazy, Lazy. How many people do you know who are sitting around with time on their hands. Not many I'd guess. People aren't lazy, they just don't want to work any harder than they already do. Consider early web designers; long hours, sweating out HTML code and reconstructing it over and over again until it's right. Where did that take us? To tons of applications that convert directly into web pages and applications like Go Live that are much more intuitive. If Structured Blogging really deserves a place on the web, creative types will figure a way to make it simple and intuitive. It can't be that difficult!