Structured Blogging
Year: 2005
Author: The Structured Blogging Folks
Platform: Other
Category: Utility
Publisher: structuredblogging.org
Price: Free!
I’ve been playing with the Structured Blogging plugin for Wordpress for a while now, and just noticed a new version – it’s almost up to the mythical “1.0 release”. They’ve added a bunch of new microcontent types with some great structured metadata appropriate to each type. I’m planning on using structured blogging a lot more in the future.
From the Structured Blogging project website:
Structured Blogging is a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.
Think of structured blogging as RSS for your information. Now any kind of data – events, reviews, classified ads – can be represented in your blog.
Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.
So, it’s an easy to use, flexible way of describing some standard types of things. People. Places. Events. Things. And the metadata is machine readable, enabling some of the early promise of the federated “repositories” by letting people search for stuff anywhere, and find relevant bits easily. The first bits of readily usable semantic web infrastructure.
Here’s a screenshot of the structured blogging microcontent authoring interface for Audio:
There is also a plugin available for MovableType users, if you happen to swing that way *cough*Brian*ahem*
What would be really cool is if a new microcontent type of “learning object” was defined – letting you enter some IEEE LOM-ish metadata about a resource that’s used as a learning object. There’s your learning object repository, thank you very much…
{ 1 trackback }
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
[...] Now that we did a podcast on SB.org, Arnaud (and someone named Norma D’Arcy) are bringing up good points. Norma wants ‘learning object’ microcontent types – which is actually what Joe Reger’s product does well. [...]
[...] Reading D’Arcy Norman’s ‘5 out of 5′ post on structured blogging the other day it seemed like it was probably worth revisiting the WP & MT plugin, especially in the light of how it might be used in a multi-user blogging environment and the ever-deafening march of word-processing / cms on the web about to be given another serious boost by the release of WordPress 2.0. [...]
Getting back up to speed
After a week away (a trip to Nova Scotia) I find several things awaiting the effort to wrap-mind-around, amidst the familiar feeling that it’s all moving a bit faster than I am, or can:The impact of AJAX on web operations…
[...] from Structured Blogging: Semantic web for the rest of us? [...]
No, I copied over files in each of those dirs. Maybe it’s my theme. Ive found that some that doont work on my travelogue dor work on my neptune. I’ll try that out.
woah. that’s weird. I had to copy files into
/wp-admin
/wp-content/plugins
/wpsb-files
But it was straightforward copying over. Wonder if it’s a PHP version mismatch or something? Shouldn’t be an issue…
d – it actually embeds 2 flavours of metadata directly in the HTML page (just view source on the blog entry to see the full goods). First, there’s the “structured blogging” elements: (let’s see if the raw code survives posting in a blog comment
)
year="2005"
platform="other"
category="utility"
price="Free!"
publisher="structuredblogging.org"
url="http://www.structuredblogging.org"
image="http://www.darcynorman.net/images/structuredblogging_contenttypes.png"/>
And then there’s the standard RDF stuff with a Dublin Core record embedded within:
what form does the metadata take—does a header contain it all? can one express and interpret it easily enough without a GUI? can an entry contain more than one category of content?
i was thinking a while ago that it might be helpful to be able to put tags around content that bots could understand.
this is my super-cool podcast...
[link to audio]
thanks for listening. yours truly, D'arcy.
Oh, and the exact metadata varies depending on the microcontent type – so an audio file will have audio-related stuff, a software review will have software-review-related stuff…
Weird… every second plugin I try to install and use gives error messages. I guess this was the second plugin. Wait, no… sticky didnt work either.
I wonder what
Fatal error: Failed opening required ‘XPath.class.php’ (include_path=”) in /home/sites/site49/web/wpsb-files/microcontent/microcontent.php on line 2
means when I try to write using a template?
On the tasklist for sure.
Better get that cough looked at.
Learning formats! How cool would that be. I don’t know if I’m thinking the same stuff as you, but it could be perfect to have bite-sized tutorials on various subjects. Or quizes for distance/e-learning. I’m gonna look into making one for that.