Structured Blogging Initiative

Marc Canter opened the floor for the discussion on the Structured Blogging Initiative at the Syndicate conference in San Francisco this week.

The initiative is about open standards, will support microformats, media RSS and more. "Beyond a media and event blogging tool, it can also post reviews. We currently have it working for Word Press and Moveable Type," says Marc. Jeff Clavier's take here.

Structured Blogging is a new way to organize blog content at the authoring stage so that readers, aggregators and applications can better navigate, sort through and understand that content. A key implication is that when a blogger puts something on a blog is that they retain ownership of it. Right now, we have portals, like Craigs List, Monster and eBay - they own the content.

Says Pub Sub's Salim Ismail, "Craigs List is largely successful because its free to publish. We're launching tools to make it easy for people to publish XML...."

In a world of syndication, we want maximization of blogs across the board. When you have structured code that is syndicated, others can use it more easily. They also brought up FeedMesh, which Matt Hicks wrote about in eWeek six months ago.

The FeedMesh concept takes the dozens of ping services that exist today a step further by seeking cooperation among aggregators to share updates among themselves. Doc pipes in, "We're all creators and publishers now, not consumers."

Others in the room who are supporting the initiative stand up and talk about their involvement, commitment and benefits to the industry as a whole.

Kaliya Hamlin on identity, Mary Hodder on itags, Susan Mernit, KnowNow's Ron Rasmussen, Pluck's Dave Panos, Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, as well as folks from iVillage, Pheedo and Tribe.

Kaliya Hamlin

Michael Arrington (hey, how do I get my clients stickers plastered all over his laptop??)

Dave Panos from Pluck

Tag: Syndicate Tag: Doc Searls Tag: Syndication