Comments on: Structured blogging as Web 2.0 colonialism

By: Alex Barnett blog

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 04:23:16 +0000

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger

You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and…

By: Bob Wyman

Bob Wyman — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:02:47 +0000

Structured Blogging is valuable to bloggers and publishers even without applications that “scrape” their sites. We’ve proved this already. One of the things that I insisted on when we released our first Structured Blogging WordPress extensions last Winter was that we build NO applications that use the data. I felt that we needed to prove that people would use the tools even if there were no applications that aggregated their data. Only if we could show real value to the publisher — without leveraging the value to aggregators — would we be sure that Structured Blogging would be successful.

Take a look at http://incredibooks.com/. This site is filled book reviews created using our original SB extensions. The authors of this site have been filling it with structured reviews for months — yet, no aggregators exist to consume the data. Clearly, the authors have chosen to use the tool because it makes it easier for them to produce a site that communicates well what they have to say. Also, note that each of their reviews includeds links to Amazon with their Amazon affiliate code. Thus, the authors can use their site to make some money. If they had posted those reviews on Amazon itself, or on some other review aggregator, then their affiliate codes wouldn’t be there and they would get no credit for the sales they generate… A Structured Blogging review is not only better formatted than most other “reviews” on blogs, it is also much more valuable than reviews posted in wall-garden review aggregator sites.

Kedrosky is wrong. Structured Blogging won’t flop. It has already succeeded.

bob wyman

By: Jeff Clavier

Jeff Clavier — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:17:33 +0000

Yes, by using structured blog posts, you will make it easier for scrapers to extract your content, but it is already the case today by the sheer fact that you are publishing an RSS feed, or even are putting content out in HTML format.
Structured Blogging will help service providers extract and distribute the content that you have bothered formatting with higher semantic value. How it in turns brings you benefit: sale of something, references, traffic, etc. will depend on the business model of the service that is reproducing your content.

By: Blogdigger Development Blog

Blogdigger Development Blog — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 06:47:31 +0000

Structured Blogging is for Lazy People

Paul Kedrosky says structured blogging will fail because people are lazy. I think it will succeed because people are lazy. Paul is absolutely right about people being lazy; that’s why no one bothered to blog before templating apps like Blogger came al…

By: Christian Schade

Christian Schade — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:20:30 +0000

Now, what we are facing here is nothing but the balancing off of forces. The market is required to pay for the party and the rebels have to be there to move the market. I think that seeing web 2.0 as a new, free, democratic movement is a big mistake. What is actually happening is that we are about to remove the concept of “the website”. The idea of context control, user and space management is rapidly devolving. Business will adapt to that or die. Users will support this new biz (or not). But it will not be more “democratic”, “free”, “true” or “whatever” than before….

By: SocialTwister

SocialTwister — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 21:35:18 +0000

Structured Blogging and the Pull-and-Pay Dilemma

I guess it was yesterday that Marc Canter dropped the newest, shiniest version of the Structured Blogging initiative. For anyone that’s not aware, Structured Blogging is essentially an effort to make blog data (reviews, events, etc.) more machine-read…

By: Abort, Retry, Ignore

Abort, Retry, Ignore — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:36:57 +0000

Grok-ation Complete (and it only took 2.5 years)

By: Kenneth Stein

Kenneth Stein — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 18:16:42 +0000

One need only look to the method by which this effort is being forwarded to sense the lack of sincerity. This is a test to the bloggers out there to see how keen they are to attempts at manipulation.

In essence, this is a 3rd class attempt at an implementation of the semantic net. If these companies want to aggregate, let them devise a method by which the aggregation contributes to the discovery of meaning at the intersection of various blog entries.

By: Greg Yardley

Greg Yardley — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 13:46:14 +0000

Griffin – from what I understand you wouldn’t have control over who scraped it up unless you specifically banned their crawlers in your robots.txt file.

Jeff – yes, I’d agree that win-win is baked into del.icio.us and Flickr. You can dicker about the amount of the win for each side but in general, no prob. Correct me if I’m wrong, though, but Structured Blogging would allow any folks with a scraper to reuse content, including services I might never want to use.

Peter – nothing to disagree with here!

Bernard – appreciate your comment and want you to know I wasn’t trying to be a tool; I really think the magic juice for this sort of application is going to be easy sharing-back to the content providers.

Salim – yep, Google profits (and how), but they also give me traffic in exchange. Without that traffic coming in, I’d probably modify my robots.txt file – I did this a while back to some crawlers that were getting a little too greedy, switching it back only last month. Good point on the copyright ownership, but how to I capitalize on this?

Phillip – thanks for the clarification. Good to know I can reserve rights should I want to. Like I said to Salim, now how do I capitalize on this?

By: Phillip Pearson

Phillip Pearson — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 09:23:03 +0000

Note that the license selector also includes “All rights reserved”, if you want to let people know for sure that they’re not allowed to do anything with your work, and “Unspecified”, if you want to be vague. So it’s not just “free for all” creative commons stuff