Bob Wyman has written a profound post about the business implications of structured blogging, and prospective search. Prospective search is like watch lists – you setup what you’re looking for and you get advised when new content is published meeting your match. You can find about a match in seconds. Structured blogging is a way of the world’s millions of bloggers feeding data into cyberspace in a pre defined way to enable faster and more targeted access.
For example, bloggers could feed event details in and prospective search engines could process the entries as event data and treat it differently to a general rant. Wyman’s blog entry provides a far better discussion than I could write. He also talks about the busiuness context. Here is the heart of the post in my view:
With Structured Blogging, we’ll be able to post structured items in any of millions of blogs or web sites and have those items recognized, indexed, and searched on any number of search sites — just like HTML pages are today. No longer will we need to rely on going to a small number of centralized, walled-garden, closed sites like MeetUp, eBay, Monster, or EVDB to publish or search for the kind of information that requires structure. Common search engines like Google, Yahoo! and PubSub will be able to usefully index this data.
There are implications here for the news and information industry because we are all about publishing and disseminating news and information. Structured blogging brings a level of control and focus to the hitherto somewhat uncontrolled blogging in a way which makes blog content more useful and accessible.