Marc's Voice

Dick Hardt refutes Paul Kedrovsky

Here’s what Dick Hardt had to say to Paul K:

My buddy Paul Kedrosky recently wrote that Structured Blogging Will Flop. His reasons:

It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:

People are lazy
People are lazy
People are lazy

I agree people are lazy. I know. I’m lazy. So is Paul. He is so lazy that he uses the same point three times in a row. I am a supporter of structured blogging. To counter, each of my points will be different, and I will even up the ante with a fourth:

Existing structures
Real time web
Machine RSS
Spam issues

1. Existing structures. Lots of bloggers categorize and tag their content today. People are already taking the time to add semantics. Blogging tools strive to differentiate themselves, and will add tools to make it easy to add structured blogging to their post, just like it is easy to tag and categorize. (btw: Paul, when are you moving to WordPress?) Since I am lazy, I would prefer to create a post about a public event so that it gets promoted by event tracking systems like Eventful, rather then run around and promote it myself.

2. Real time web. As the web gets bigger, and the cycle time of polling all the pages by the search engines gets longer, the relevancy of a search drops. The data in an RSS feed, or in the future, in a Ping, will be more relevant then data on a web page. If the data is structured, it will be even more relevant

3. Machine RSS. Lots of interesting feeds are not generated by humans. It is easy for machines to endlessly add the same structure tags to data that already has structure. With the rise of the real time web, publishers of data will look to move their data out so that it is easily found, just like people have been doing search engine optimization for years.

4. Spam issues. One kind of structure that is needed is the identity of the blog. 75% of new pings are spings (splogs). Splogs and spings are degrading the value of the real time web. Efforts are under way to resolve this problem, and hopefully we have all learned from our ant-spam experiences on how to do this right.

Structured blogging will not solve world hunger. It will likely look somewhat different from what the existing structured blogging effort, and I am sure there was more hype, then beef at Syndicate about this, but let’s not be lazy and dismiss it out of hand.