Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Yes, the current structured blogging effort is not optimal and neither are microformats. But yes the blogging world needs more structure that doesn't compromise its easy to create content nature! Two examples from something I love: recipes and digital camera reviews. Wouldn't it be great to have recipe aggregators and review aggregators so when you are cooking and buying stuff you could get consolidated, rich view from blogs rather than random results from Google searches (that are currently compromised by spammers and commercial information free "reviews"). I know that most of the good recipes and reviews are on blogs NOT on CNET or Yahoo or epicurious or the big sites or even opinions but try finding them with a search engine. Good luck!

And as Marc Canter says more normal people (or "humans" :-) as Marc likes to call them!) will write reviews and recipes than work with the blank "digital paper" slate of blogs as they stand today.

So I think the structured bloging advocates and Kedrosky are both right: we need more easy to use structure AND existing bloggers won't change (at least not overnight).

In either case, Drupal already has the ability to generate any format from its database and the ability to easily create content types for any more structured approach. Today, for instance, Drupal already has content types other than blog posts like "stories", "books" and "audio" and "video". Bottom line, I am not worried about what happens. With Drupal and its excellent community of developers who have written and will continue to write many amazing modules to generate a wide variety of content, I am covered!

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Structured Blogging Will Flop.:

QUOTE

Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging - the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they're posting - is going to be a flop.

UNQUOTE