I use ZDNet reviews and comparison charts before buying gadgets. ZDNet pay dozens of journalists to review hundreds of products and a lot of effort goes into producing detailed reviews, under structured categories, which allow accurate comparisons, to enable informed purchases.

Now, take away “dozens of journalists” and insert “thousands of bloggers”. You can scale the number of products reviewed accordingly.

Listen to the recent Attention Tech podcast featuring Dave Winer and ZDNet’s Dan Farber. Dave thinks career journalism is going to go the way of horse-drawn carriages. Structured blogging is a step in that direction.

Tom - this was a fantastic interview, and I’m looking forward to part 2. I had no idea what pubsub was about before this. Planning a move off blogger to wordpress soon, so I’ll be trying the new for myself.

Okay, I’ve been less than complementary about podcasting in the past. Just because it didn’t suit me. Since then I’ve listened to an interview with IBM’s social media supremo, Mike Wing, courtesy of Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz. Dennis Howlett

@Piaras - if you are interested in seeing how it is delivered, why not try out the WordPress structured blogging plugin?

No doubt Ecto will update to take structured blogging into account - if not, they will be left behind - mind you, I prefer the web interface - many of the other plugins don’t work with the likes of Ecto - think Ultimate Tagging Warrior, for example.

Yeah I’m not that convinced by structured blogging. I’d be interested in seeing how this is delivered. It sounds to me that there is another degree of complicity being added for the lay man and that he simply won’t use it.

Take the Harry Potter example that he gives. I can just go to Metacritic and get it. So if I’m a lay person who is posting a review, why wouldn’t I just post as usual and submit to Meta Critic. Espeicially in light of the fact that more people are turning to desktop publishing tools like ecto, so the WordPress pulgin is effectively rendered useless

What I’m excited about and finally glad to see someone is finally doing is categorised feeds, in that people can search for specifics. I’m just not so sure how quick people will be to actually put the content into that structure. I know that I wouldn’t be that bothered.

I’m going to hold off evangalising this until I see the structure and interface. Any chance of some pics?

Structured blogging sounds really interesting… not sure what I make of it yet. It has obvious advantages in certain areas certainly, and I look forward to seeing the next set of tools…

The following are my initial questions… (sorry if they are somewhat confused, still trying to grasp exactly what’s coming down the line here…)

What types of content does Salim believe will be, and should be, structured - is it possible/desirable to try to structure everything, or is there a very specific list of content types to be structured?

Is structured blogging a commercial tool, or at least does Salim foresee it being taken up primarily for commercial uses?

I ask this last one because it strikes me that average Joe will not want to structure anything (deal with more fields, extra clicks etc) unless there is a return on his investment for doing so - any additional effort in posting to his blog will have to yield results other than visual differenciation (I think!).
So, quicker uptake by potential buyers for his ‘Bike for Sale’ post might be worth the effort, but that post about what he had for breakfast isn’t really going to benefit from structure… or is it?

Which leads me to my next question - could structured blogging radically change the signal/noise ratio by reducing the interest level in ‘what i had for breakfast’ type posts and therefore reducing the level of interest in producing them? If so, is this a good thing?

Is there a move to make Structured Blogging, or structured publishing, an actual web standard?

And finally (for now)…

Is structure more desirable/achievable than the ability to determine relevance?

phew… and that’s just for starters…! But I have to go play poker

While I didn’t have any questions prior to the interview I sure have a lot of them now! If only I could formulate them - still trying to figure out the connotations of Structured Blogging!

I’ll be back!