Structured Blogging & dataBlogging

Hey, there it is! The concept of dataBlogging coming to life! A link today on Scripting News to structuredblogging.org. From the Structured Blogging site:

Structured blogging is about making a movie review look different from a calendar entry. On the surface, it’s as simple as that - formatting blog entries around their content.

Awesome! We couldn't agree more. It's what reger.com is all about. Reger.com's take on it is very similar, but a little more based on the user functionality than the XML definition. Which means that this structured blogging contribution is very welcome. About a week ago I got an email from Bob Wyman, the CTO of PubSub saying that he was intrigued by what reger.com was doing. I was glad to hear it. Today I'm glad that they're making a contribution to the dataBlogging space... they're the people behind structuredblogging.org. I think it can help them and help the blogosphere. From their site, here's how Structured Blogging is going to help:

what we want to do is create structure (in the form of XML) around each of these types of entries, to organize the data inside and to let machine readers - other programs, sites, and aggregators - better understand the content.

Which, again, is awesome. Reger.com has been using a name/value namespace added to RSS for a while. It's located here. You can see it in action on my personal triathlon log here (note the entrydata namespace).

I hope Bob Wyman doesn't mind, but I'll post a little of the email that I sent him regarding how this concept can help PubSub:

PubSub users could define certain criteria to monitor. For example, "I want to see people who run 26.2 miles in less than 3 hours." Users can create their own data fields and custom log types, leading to a rich array of possibilities.

In the email I also acknowledged that reger.com has been focused on features, not growing its user base. Maybe Bob decided that it was better to introduce the concept to larger toolmakers to make it worth PubSub's time. From the blog at Structured Blogging it looks like he's had it in beta for a little while. Anyhow, I'm very excited about this and believe that it's an important step for the blogosphere and dataBlogging... structured blogging... whatever you call it.

I hope that reger.com can contribute to what Structured Blogging is doing. At the very least we can help with the XML scmemas and start to implement them. We have a user interface that allows users to quickly and easily add new fields. And with users already dataBlogging maybe we can test some of the XML schemas in the real world.

Anyhow, very excited to see this hitting a site as central and influential as Scripting News.

Update 11:16AM: Holy crap. Dave Winer just linked to reger.com's dataBlogging stuff. First time we've gotten exposure like that and he says:

Structured Blogging is a similar idea, but not as far along as DataBlogging, and it appears that it does not build on RSS.

Kind words, but certainly Structured Blogging has a different focus. We're just psyched that this whole concept is getting notice! WahoO!

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