Comments on: Structured Blogging - Magic or Just Another Wizard?

By: the weblog repository » another pixel in the wall

the weblog repository » another pixel in the wall — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:27:08 +0000

[...] Over at Blogsavvy, James Farmer has engaged a few Structured Blogging buffs in an interesting discussion. I’ve chimed in with a remark on a question I found on someone’s blog somewhere about searching blog posts by date using regular search engines. So far no-one tags blog post dates, do they? [...]

By: genevieve tucker

genevieve tucker — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 17:14:00 +0000

James’ notion of styled blogging has something, however badly everyone else wants to pull back the stylists and stick in some markup. As Clay Shirky has already noted, there is no shelf on the Internet - stop treating it like a library, like a physical space.

On the other hand, there are people out there - academics I think - already asking when they will be able to search across blogs for dated content on a subject (for example ‘Hurricane Katrina’ + ‘31 August 2005′. if one was researching the relief effort the day after). Dates are not even tagged yet, are they. I’ve posted a question on the Microformats blog about this, but no reply as yet.

By: James

James — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 23:59:17 +0000

Can’t we just add it to the plaque

By: Blogsavvy: Professional Blog Consultant - Consulting for blogging in business, education, the community, activism and for money

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 23:50:48 +0000

[...] This is part of a larger, ongoing series which examines how - in 2005 / 2006 - you can give people blogs. Visit the contents page to see the lot (or suggest more content!) or grab the feed to keep up with new stuff! [...]

By: Tom Carey

Tom Carey — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 00:07:41 +0000

Hmm, before we create a plaque about “The downfall of Learning Objects was the repository-centric design”, we might want to place stand-alone repositories in their historical context - a necessary phase to convince the world that there were enough objects and interest in re-use to justify integration into other tools. That’s happening now as LMS vendors integrate repository access … and as the repositories incorporate more learning design expertise they may move LMS products from course management to learning support.

By: James

James — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 03:39:28 +0000

Interesting, is there much in the way of organic microformat development, like technorati tags for example… or blended category / format stuff (more thinking out loud here, you don’t *have* to give me a lecture on this… especially this close to xmas

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 02:11:10 +0000

Heya, james! Congrats on the innovative award thingy, you ass-talker
1. It’s not a blog-only solution. Structured Blogging is just an implementation of Microformats (http://www.microformats.org) - any software (or even plain humans) can implement these standardized formats to describe a wide variety of things. I could imagine blogs “speaking” these microformats, as well as online apps like Flickr, or next-generation “learning object repository” systems as well.

The beauty of these standardized formats is that it doesn’t matter what you use to create/author/publish them - anything that understands the microformats can make use of them.

2. Well, you kinda need to use forms for the data entry side of things, but once it’s in, you can totally use styles to make it look however you like - to prevent the every-microformats-website-looks-the-same-way syndrome. Again, it’s just text content, so you’re free to apply any styles you like to it.

By: James

James — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:46:49 +0000

Just because you’re the most beautiful
Surely “add a few extra fields worth of info” is what metadata has always been about isn’t it…

Actually though, I’d like to turn this into a plaque:

“The downfall of Learning Objects was the repository-centric design, forcing people to adopt a new tool (or suite of tools) to publish, share, discover and use learning objects.”

And nail it to various vice-chancellors desks.

You do have an extremely good point that as long as we’re using these tools as our web-based publication applications then adding another form to these distributed tools is much better than adding another centralised tool. But there are still two things that bother me:

1. Am not sure if we take a flying jump and assume that blogging is going to be the forerunner of web based publications just yet, I think we can theoretically go there but to me a more pressing issue of figuring out how we do successfully apply these tools to the creation of content / communication institutionally. What role does structuring have to play / not have to play in this?

2. Forms, forms, forms… are you *sure* that styles aren’t a better idea?

Sorry to harp on about this but now I’ve got ya in a corner

By: D'Arcy Norman

D'Arcy Norman — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 15:08:47 +0000

James, the beauty of structured blogging is that it is the exact OPPOSITE approach that Learning Object Land took. You don’t have to do anything different - just keep blogging - and if you add a few extra fields worth of info, BOOM your stuff is machine readable and reusable. The downfall of Learning Objects was the repository-centric design, forcing people to adopt a new tool (or suite of tools) to publish, share, discover and use learning objects. Structured Blogging (and. more generally, microcontent formats) just fits into whatever workflow a person is already using. And, alternately, they can opt not to use it, and create plain-vanilla blog posts. That ain’t bad, either.

By: James

James — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 08:34:19 +0000

Good points guys, and yes, there is definitely a kind of benefit here, especially if you’re involved in repositories etc. In fact there are some very very interesting possibilities in regards to that, something I guess I should have noted.

‘Owever (there’s always an ‘owever I think that while valid, what you’re saying (D’Arcy & Terry), is dangerously close to ‘learning object land’ and the fascination / concern with it’s related environmental tweaks which, in my book at least, have done very few favours for online leaning in the past 5 years or so.