I first read about and subsequently looked into Structured Blogging and Microformats a while back but a recent podcast on IT Conversations by Marc Senasac reminded me of them. Marc is CEO of PeopleAggregator, a company that is trying to successfully bring together and market more buzz-words under a single umbrella than most people care to know about.
Structured Blogging
Structured Blogging is an initiative intended to bring some structure to the world of blogging. It seems like when-ever people start doing unstructured and completely random things there is always another group who wish to impose some form of framework to which they do it. Structured Blogging is attempting to infuse a little more intelligence into your average blog, mainly by first asking the blog author to give their blog post a little description (is it ramblings, a review or a podcast?). This description is recorded as a Microformat so that search engines and other such tools can do more intelligent things with blog entries than simply read them.
Because Structured Blogging is more complicated than plain old vanilla blogging its supporters are going to great lengths to make it simple and approachable through Firefox extensions and plug-ins for popular blogging platforms. The most interesting link off the Structured Blogging website is a NZ website that reviews cafes. What is troubling however is that it is difficult to identify the exact benefits (or use of) Structured Blogging, but I guess it is always useful to know about a New Zealand cafe review website. So it would seem that at the moment Structured Blogging is still a potentially great idea seeking a killer application that clarifies to the general public what it is all about and how it can be valuable.
Microformats
Microformats like their name suggests are fractions of a format. By itself a single Microformat does not amount to much, say a single address, but its power comes in the fact they are not trying to do too much for too many people. In the mid-90's XML faced this problem when trying to establish the vision outlined in the Semantic Web developers around the world began creating XML schema data structures. Unfortunately the problem with this approach is twofold.
Firstly because it was so easy to define a data standard literally hundreds, if not thousands of different standards were proposed. More often than not these competing data standards overlapped with each other which led to tension and diluted development resources. In the architecture, engineering and construction industry there emerged three XML standards that did very similar but still different things: aecXML, Green Building XML (gbXML) and ifcXML. Unfortunately for the AEC industry none of these proposed standards took hold, arguably the most successful being gbXML as it has a relatively targetted audience compared to the other, more generic models.
The second problem when dealing with a large and complex data standard is addressing the different and often competing needs of all the current and future participants. The Industry Foundation Classes are a good example of this problem. As IFC's set out to model large facets of a complex industry it has taken many years, negotiations and versions to get the data model to a stage where it can encompass a genuinely useful portion of the intended data-set.
Microformats get around these problems by focusing on a single target audience and only trying to do one thing. Whilst simple in scope even these tasks are relatively complicated. For example postal addressing on the surface appears straightforward but it is complicated by the fact each country has a unique addressing standard and means of referencing geographical locations. New Zealand and Australia are very close to each other culturally and physically but New Zealand does not have states or place as much emphasis on suburbs as Australian addresses leading to significant differences in postal address formats. These little problems can be difficult to resolve which is why Microformats by intentionally setting out to solve limited problems have been relatively successful when compared to their more complex brethren.
So what is PeopleAggregator setting out to do?
PeopleAggregator are trying to combine Structured Blogging, social networking, Microformats and identity management into a useful and user-friendly experience. Marc does a good job of explaining what it is the company does in the podcast and it is worth listening to. Also helpful is a video they have put together than in a couple of minutes gives a broad overview of what they do. The really short story is that you create an account, invite friends and then blog away amoungst each other. As you are using Structured Blogging the entries can be anything from text to video or images. The intention is that PeopleAggregator intelligently aggregates (shares) the content around all your friends without all that hassle of RSS readers and email.
Why is this interesting?
This is interesting when applied to the concepts of my thesis as the people at PeopleAggregator are using the same tool-set as I have considering to create what is hoped to be vibrant social blogging groups. Boiled down to its essentials a building design project is a group of like minded people so it is not unreasonable to suggest that useful information can be gleamed by examining how PeopleAggregtor operates and the results it receives. It is also a useful reference point because the software can be downloaded and experimented with on a local server. PeopleAggregator certainly sounds interesting although the actual results do not look all that impressive, in a kind of a MySpace meets Blogger.com way. Personally I feel that the ideas and the software itself need to go through another revision cycle before something truely practical and worthwhile emerges.