One For Truth

Coming Soon: Structured Blogging?

On the drive back from Phoenix yesterday while listening to TWIT one of the hosts went on about how much he relied on Amazon reviews in deciding which products to buy. I have to agree, there are a lot of good product reviews out there. Of course not all online reviews are created equal; most of the reviews on cNet, for instance, are drivel. But you can usually tell who knows what they're talking about and get some excellent reviews on Amazon.

Still, I think that with the growth of blogs we are likely to see a decline in online reviews. Why post a review to Amazon if you've already posted a review on your blog? This is the exact reason why I don't post audiobook reviews to Audible.com any longer.

So with the reasonable expectation that a lot of reviews are moving from website-specific collections to dispersed blogs, the question becomes: How can we get those reviews back out to the general public? A possible solution is brewing in Structured Blogging.

In essence, Structured Blogging provides a way for you to tag your content so that it can be easily aggregated and searched. Using the reviews example, if I wrote a review on Donnie Darko I could use the Structured Blogging rules to tag the post as a review so that anyone looking for reviews of the film would be able to find my review.

Even as I say this, some might be thinking "Well who the hell wants to read what you or some other shmuck have to say about a movie/book/restaurant/whatever?" If that describes you, you are probably a) clueless about the significance of the blog revolution, b) hostile to it because it's a threat to your career, or c) Steve or Josh from Stupid Church People (to get what I mean, see--or rather listen to--this benighted podcast). But if you're Steve or Josh the only blog or podcast you care about is your own, so you wouldn't see this anyway. Punks.

posted by Zeke @ 8:57 PM