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Kimbro Staken exploring creative use of technology and whatever else happens to seem interesting.
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Microformats and Structured Blogging are not competitors
It’s been an unfortunately common misconception that Structured Blogging and Microformats are competitors. Now, even Marc Canter whose company hired me to work on Structured Blogging late last year, has fallen into the trap of thinking this way when he says “However with the demise (and inevitable dissolution of PubSub) it looks like Dave Sifry’s stampeding marketing efforts have won.”. How can they win when they’re not even competeting? I’ll lay it out in simple terms here.
Structured Blogging is a Open Source project that builds TOOLs to publish microcontent including Microformats
Microformats is an open effort to build FORMATs for microcontent data.
Tools and formats are not the same thing. These projects are fully in line with each other and both efforts are necessary.
In fact, from looking through the results of the Technorati Microfomats search, next to the various Yahoo services, users of the Structured Blogging plugins are probably the biggest generators of Microformated Review data.
Why is this? It’s because the Structured Blogging plugins are a TOOL that makes it really easy to create the reviews. People aren’t using the tool because they want to publish structured data, even I don’t really use it for that reason, they use it because it makes writing reviews easier. A side effect of that is that the review gets published in the hReview Microformat as well as the Structured Blogging XML format.
Now I hear you say, but why the other format? There are a number of reasons the XML format still needs to exist.
- There aren’t yet Microformats for every type of data that people want to publish.
- The Microformats that do exist often don’t cover the full range of data that the tool needs to track.
- There is data that needs to be tracked, but should not have a visible presence on the page.
- The tool uses the format internally for all editing operations because of the first item above and because it’s a lot easier to work with the XML using XML tools like XPath, than it is to deal with the Microformatted data.
- Historical - The first version of the Structured Blogging plugins published only that XML block and the requirements when we built the new version dictated that we maintain the external publication of the data in the same manner. Those requirements were dictated by PubSub, more on this later.
Those formats are then published to the world for most of the same reasons. Now however, in the cases where there is an existing Microformat it will be used as well. So currently you can use the Structured Blogging tools to generate hReview, hCalendar, hCard, XOXO, rel-tag and rel-license Microformatted data and it is my explicit goal to continue to use Microformats where ever they fit. So again how can we be competing when a big focus of our efforts revolves around publishing Microformatted data?
Over time as more Microformats emerge we’ll continue to add support until the time where everything we want to do has an associated Microformat. At that point we’ll probably still have an associated XML format for each content type because of the internal needs of the tool, but whether those formats are used widely outside the tool is an open question and really not relevant in looking at things today.
Marc Canter also seems to see the death of PubSub as the death of Structured Blogging as well. Now here’s what Marc really doesn’t get, Structured Blogging is supposed to be an Open Source project. And one of the great things about Open Source projects is that they can survive the death of any supposed backing companies. And that’s especially true when the backing companies aren’t actually doing any of the development work which was the case with PubSub.
In this case I see the death of PubSub as a good thing. PubSub and Technorati were competitors and even though the Structured Blogging effort isn’t a competitor to Microformats, many people still extended the PubSub/Technorati competition to the Structured Blogging/Microformats efforts. At one point in time that may have even been true, but now, as I’ve tried to communicate here, it no longer is. Personally, I’m happy to see PubSub out of the picture. Now we can refocus the Structured Blogging effort on being truly open and focused around building really cool tools to create fun applications of Microcontent. We can also be free to fix some of the more controversial elements of the tools, deepen the support of Microformats and bring the concept of microcontent publishing into many other systems.
So contrary to what Marc says I don’t see the death of PubSub as any kind of loss for the Structured Blogging effort, in fact I see it as an opportunity for a new beginning.
This entry was posted by Kimbro Staken on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 2:26 pm and is filed under General, XML, Microcontent, Microformats, Structured Blogging. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.
June 22nd, 2006 at 3:55 pm
[…] An important point many people are missing. I constantly hear questions like “So should I use Microformats or is Structured Blogging better?”. Kimbro Staken, who did much of the programmming of the Structured Blogging code, has an excellent post on the situation of Structured Blogging in the face of the breakdown of PubSub. Phillipp Pearson shares my and Kimbro’s view on the situation of Structured Blogging: It’s the community which will power Structured Blogging independently of PubSub or any other company. If you’re comparing Microformats and Structured Blogging: There are so many more ideas and concepts around the Structured Blogging project like RedirectThis and OutputThis which are more than valuable for the blogosphere. It was a smart move of the Structured Blogging team to support Microformats. But there’s so much more in the Structured Blogging project than just formats and standards. It’s a good experience to see that so many people of the original Structured Blogging team stick to the project despite the problems PubSub is having. To all of the Structured Blogging team: We’ve had an awesome feedback to the technology you have been developing and working hard on. I’ll personally do all I can too continue the success of the Structured Blogging project. […]
June 22nd, 2006 at 4:40 pm
[…] Kimbro Staken makes many correct statements and declares a new beginning for StructuredBlogging.org - but before I just completely just take back everything I just said, let me point out some cold hard facts: […]
June 23rd, 2006 at 9:30 am
Kimbro, In your list of reasons for the “XML Format” you left out a few:
1. There are many XML encodings that have been defined by industry standards groups and it would be ridiculous to insist that all of them be re-defined into microformat equivelants. The “subnode” format that I defined as an alternative to XHTML markup makes it possible to use existing formats without having to redefine them all. I think that is a “good” thing.
2. The XHTML stuff is really hard to parse and manipulate.
3. XHTML markup does’t work in HTML and can’t leverage parsing code written for non-(X)HTML projects when standard XML is being used.
4. etc….
In any case, there never should have been any competition between microformats and structured blogging. Structured blogging is not about formats, it is about tools and about things you do. The formats are only low-level technology that users should never be exposed to and shouldn’t have any reason to care about. All users should care about is that *some* format exists.
I’m sorry that you “see the death of PubSub as a good thing”. We tried hard to stay in the background on Structured Blogging explicitly in order to attempt to avoid the kind of silly competition that has been going on. We paid Marc (and you) to build tools since we genuinely wanted the tools to be developed without having to embroil the issue in commercial battles. We intentionally left you folk with a tremendous amount of freedom to determine how those tools should be built. This was all done to keep Structured Blogging out of a PubSub vs Technorati battle… I wish that those who viewed themselves as our competitors could have found it in themselves to focus more on the needs of the community and less on their competitive advantage. We don’t need more formats (micro or otherwise) what we need is more tools in the hands of real users.
bob wyman
June 24th, 2006 at 3:31 am
I totally agree with Bob. The thing I liked about StructuredBlogging from the beginning was that it’s not about formats but value for the user. Only if the users can easily publish ANY FORMAT they need a majority of people will come to “feel” the advantages of structured in information.
We probably have millions of formats based on XML on this planet and microformats don’t offer any technology to embed those in feeds and web pages in a form that they can parsed by a machine and validated. The whole concept of Structured Blogging is very convincing and powerful. I don’t know who came with it but those people know what they were doing. I still feel that we have to improve the way we present Structurd Blogging to a greater public (the people and companies not blogging). But the project went off to a good start.
June 25th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
[…] Nice writeup about the differences between Structured Blogging and microformats here. It’s because the Structured Blogging plugins are a TOOL that makes it really easy to create the reviews. People aren’t using the tool because they want to publish structured data, even I don’t really use it for that reason, they use it because it makes writing reviews easier. […]
June 27th, 2006 at 10:33 am
We need more tools for consuming data before structured blogging can take off. Check out my post at http://jasonkolb.typepad.com/weblog/2006/06/this_is_not_an__1.html for an example.
July 2nd, 2006 at 8:43 am
[…] Kimbro further clears up confusion around Structured Blogging and Microformats and declares a new beginning for the initiative. […]
March 15th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
[…] In June 2006 Kimbro Staken, one of the original Broadband Mechanics who programmed the plug-ins, claimed that there would soon be a rebirth for structured blogging because PubSub had ceased operations, and their feud with Technorati had been a huge and confusing diversion for everyone who had been trying to push ideas about structured blogging forward. […]