The Structured Blogging/MicroFormats Debate - Different Sides of the Same Coin

We’ve seen the explosion of blogging into all facets of life. It seems that nowadays we can expect our blog served cold and hot, depending on the engine of your choice. As this content continues to bloom, many are trying to better understand it. You see, we put everyting and anything into our blogs - from photos to reminders to articles and everything in between. Of course, this is all potentially a huge database of different types of information - if it only had structure.

That’s right, we aren’t very good at actually making our information consistent. Each island, what we call a blog, develops its own standard and method for publishing this data right now. Some groups have set out to scour the web for that data and make sense of it - a valiant effort to say the least, but some future efforts may largely undo the necessity.

What are those efforts? Well, there’s two primary camps right now. Microformats, advocated by Technorati, provide a XHTML-based approach to identifying meaningful data. Microformats rely on convention over configuration - a phrase I’m borrowing from my Rails bretheren. Microformats establish a standard convention for how to map and model your information and publicize that for all to use. Specialty tools, currently in the form of Javascript extensions, are able to automatically extract this information based on the pattern.

The other entrant in this movement, is Structured Blogging, from the fine folks at PubSub. Structured Blogging tends to work from the other end of the spectrum, advocating the extension of publishing tools to generate “better” content. Right now, Structured Blogging is taking the plug-in approach and working to create plug-ins for the leading blog tools that will assist the user in creating structured blog content.

Of course, I was talking about this more than a year ago. I ran a series of posts about Blog Entry Archetypes. I definitely can appreciate where both groups are coming from.

However, for me, these two camps are really different sides of the same coin. The end result of Structured Blogging is XML, so why not XHTML? If we go with XHTML, we end up with Microformats. Realistically, why wouldn’t we present the data using a microformat, when available?

The same goes true in the reverse. No one wants to remmber the standard. No one wants to really write XHTML if they can just fill out a form (well most sane people don’t). Tantek demostrated the conversion process for me at Gnomedex earlier this year - it was straightforward (especially for him). But why bother? There are tools that can assist me in the creation process and Structured Blogging seems to be advocating that route.

Stowe has alluded to potential business motivations tht might be driving the various approaches. I think he’s certainly onto something. But in the end, both parties say they’re open - and I believe them. In the end, they want data that’s parseable - what red-blooded geek doesn’t? Arguing over what’s more important, the hammer or the chisel - well, that seems pointless.

In the end we’re all just users and we want to be as lazy a s possible but still expect the world ;)