Structured Blogging doomed to fail

I’ve been doing online media for the last ten years. Ever since the first article I slapped into a database, there have been fields for classifying articles by subject/person/company/etc.

We’re not talking blogs here. We’re talking about genuine media operations with paid sub-editors and production people whose job is actually to make sure these little things get filled in properly.

Yet, it has ALWAYS been a constant battle to force people to properly fill in these fields.

So now the structured blogging movement is expecting bloggers to routinely tag their content based on supposed industry-standard fields and conventions. It won’t happen. I’ve been there, done that.

And why should they when all we need is intelligent search engines to do the job for us. A review-specific search engine can scan the blogosphere for review content and enable its results to be automatically leveraged by all bloggers, for example.

Which should be where the blogosphere is heading. Enabling individual bloggers to add more functionality and therefore revenue opportunities to their blogs, not enabling content aggregators to more effectively rape and pillage the blog community. But again, that’s the subject of tomorrow’s blog.

UPDATE: Just to prove my point, I subconsciously failed to categorise this post…

Filed under: Blogs