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…