BLOGSAVVY

Reading D’Arcy Norman’s ‘5 out of 5′ post on structured blogging the other day it seemed like it was probably worth revisiting the WP & MT plugin, especially in the light of how it might be used in a multi-user blogging environment and the ever-deafening march of word-processing / cms on the web about to be given another serious boost by the release of WordPress 2.0.

I mean, the concept is great, especially if you want students / probloggers / business people or just plain old you to be able to write material that is instantly semantically organised, structured and meta tagged to high heaven. No more behind the scenes coding, no more tricky headings / subheadings etc. and it’ll even automatically post at multiple locations through Outputthis.org and add in your Amazon Affiliate details. What more could you want?

However, in reality I’m not sure if it’s that simple and something bugs me about form filling and the impact that might have on content & creativity. Naturally this is going to help all of you SEO folks no end but does it work for your everyday blogger? I’m tempted to say ‘no’.

First up it harks back to pre WSYWIG days (these are a distant and painful memory for any WPMU site owners “um, it’s called a ‘quicktag’ etc. etc. :) just allowing users text into particular forms and a single image upload. Secondly these forms are, as you would expect, pretty overdone in terms of detail, great for a data entry clerk (or a computer… if you like your blogging that way, some smart bunny could get this to strip every book off Amazon and then just write the ‘reviews’ and watch the adsense /affiliate stuff come on it) but not for you or me, really.

But most importantly, perhaps, it reminds me far too much of MS Word Wizards back in the day. The principle is essentially the same and we know that they were invariably painful, unpleasant and unnecessary problems… solved by (in the case of most publishers - which is what we are after al) the uses of different *styles & formatting*.

And perhaps that’s where we ought to be heading… in our ultimately wonderfully subvertable blogging world… towards ’styled blogging’ where we can semantically create our documents on the fly and in the way we want rather than through a pile of forms. We’re already on our way there with enclosures and tags, a push in the WSYWIG direction towards AV icons with relevant fields could make a lot more sense and be a lot more usable.

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

Quite wonderfully Blogtalk Downunder has inspired, in part, New Zealand’s first International blog conference… Blog Hui.

So why don’t ya go and make a bunch of kiwis very very happy by proposing a paper, poster, praxis or workshop… beautiful Wellington combined with a quick scoot round the island sounds like a good way to spend the middle of March to me!!!

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.