A first draft of my contribution to Sam Ruby's Well Formed Weblog wiki.

1 Summary

Packages of structured data are becoming post components. [PhilWolff]

2 Description

The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity. Each post only needs one field, and maybe a title and url.

Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator. Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time. 

When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form. The form will have its own metadata and its own data model.

Consider a school soccer coach. An after game report typically includes:

• which teams played,
• where and when,
• officials, and
• a list of game events
  • who scored (and when and how),
  • who received penalties (when and for what), etc.

Wouldn't it be handy for your blogging tool to:

• understand this structure,
• present an editing form,
• render the form in html to your blog, and
• render the post (including the form) to your rss feed?

News aggregators and news readers should be able to:

• Autodiscover an unknown schema.
• Notify the user that a new schema is available.
• Learn the schema, including entry forms, pick list sources, rendering guidance, and default style sheets.
• Make it available when the blogger is ready to write.

"The Semantic Weblog" will create a happy blend of natural, human unstructured words, pictures, sounds, and video with machine readable and highly comparable more-structured data.

3 Use Cases and Potential Applications

3.1 Recipes and Golf Scores

• What I'm listening to now. (with enough info that a newsreader could find and play that tune, when the package comes in via RSS.)
• Concert review. (3 points for lighting, 2 for sound, 4 for audience involvement, ...)
• Strange things in my referral log. (A real blog)
• Beer reviews. (A real blog)
• Dating reports. (6 stars on manners, 9 on heat, 2 on wardrobe, ...)

Companies that make personal planners (filofax, Day Timer, Day Runner) sell paper forms. These help you:

• plan projects,
• manage your to do lists,
• control your diabetes,
• remember birthdays,
• record expenses, mileage,
• plan parties,
• take phone messages,
• take meeting minutes,
• prioritize goals.

This behavior should translate nicely to blogging, especially as blogging tools support faceted presentation (you see what you're intended to see).

3.2 Work related blogging

Organizations have been using forms since the Ottoman Empire. Forms help:

• standardize routine communication,
• shorten the time people take to report information,
• make it easier for human readers to parse familiar formats,
• improve completeness of information (blanks stand out),
• and other wonderful things that make organizations work smoothly.

And that's when people fill out forms.

By having machines deliver transaction notes and reports to a blogger's news reader, you can provoke commentary about those transactions in the blog.

3.3 Interop with enterprise applications

• my blog can notify the CRM via trackback
• the CRM can take note of the permalink of my post (for CRM users), and
• the CRM can append changes to data I made with my blogging tool ("He's not really the decision maker.").

Along the way...

• information locked inside an enterprise system become visible to our intranet search engine via my blog.
• more useful content finds its way into enterprise systems.
• transactional data takes on context.

4 Architecture

4.1 Packages

• Envelope
  • Descriptive stuff about contents (names, how many packages, etc.)
  • URL of structure definition
  • Version/Release/Modification Date of structure definition
• Package(s)
  • URL of structure definition

4.2 Package Syndication

• Blogging tools should be able to wrap each structure in RSS, RDF or whatever we're using for syndication.

4.3 Package Discovery

I'm thinking we could follow the example of:

• Little orange XML links (on pages and with rendered packages)
• the RSS Autodiscovery metatag form

4.4 Package Aggregation and Analysis

4.4.1 Aggregation

4.4.2 Analysis

4.5 Rendering

4.5.1 Edit Form

4.5.2 HTML

4.5.3 RSS

5 Live Examples

5.1 Qlogger

5.2 JemBlog

Development Diary, Notes, Download, Mailing List, SourceForge.

6 Discussion

* [PhilWolff] This extension may be out of scope per Sam's blog post

I'll take feedback in the comments to this post or, even better, on the wiki page.

Have you ever taken a blogging vacation? I mean a vacation from blogging? Three flavors:

• There's the Silicon Valley flavor (a long weekend),
• the US standard (2 weeks, checking in occasionally), or
• the European version (not even visiting the blogosphere for 4-6 weeks and spending that time on renewal, sunshine, travel, and the good things in life).

The unblogged vacation may be part of blogging mental health, part of the ergonomics of this thing we do. I took one recently and it changed what I'm writing, how I'm writing, and for whom. Sort of hitting the reset button, taking a step back, and touching on my motives and my personal rewards.

We are stressed enough. The average worker only takes 21 minutes for lunch.

And what happens when your blog is part of your workplace persona? Maybe this is a new employee benefit.

Have you taken a break? What happened? Suggestions?

Last summer I posted about four roles for intranet blogging: catalyst, coach, armorer, practice leader. Matt Mower advocates the role of "Intranet Editor."

Here' s a sixth: Scribe.

The person who takes amazing notes. Thorough. Complete. Unfiltered.

I saw Doc Searls do this at the first SuperNova (the man must type 120 words per minute). Matt scribed the Gurteen KM gathering (an amazing job). Heath Row the Jupiter WBS sessions (the man has endurance).

Common emphasis on high fidelity capture of who said what. Light on opinion.

Value to the team:

• The official record.
• Immediacy.
• Makes you feel like you are there.
• Basis for opinion formed later.

Professional transcription can run 3-4 hours for every hour recorded. The scribe shortcircuits this with realtime, if imperfect, capture and publishing.