The way we work, and the tools we use at work are going to radically change over the next couple of years.

Microsoft is busing putting together Office Live. Google has to be up to something along the same lines, though it seems to be very much on the QT at the moment. And then there are all the Web Office companies I feature in my Web Office Technology directory, including Zimba, Six Apart, NumSum, and SocialText.

The total impact of all these technologies upon the work-place will be tremendous. As I have said before, the basic work place tools, like the Word Processor will no longer be needed. More broadly, companies will need to think about how they can keep up with the pace of this innovation. Companies will need to recognize that the constant innovation is a business strategy, and in a world of global competition, constant innovation is probably the only business strategy that can guarantee a constant stream of significant profits.

Firms that use enterprise blogging / Web Office technology and take steps to enable their innovation creators will be better positioned to compete in this new world order.

However, there is still much to be learned about how to use this Web 2.0 technology and how to manage people so that they can take full advantage of Web Office technology.

My day job is working for one of the big 4 audit / consulting firms. My main roll is to provide consulting services to our clients. However, I am also leading our effort to build an enterprise blogging solution. This new platform has the potential to revolutionize the way people in the firm work and share information.

Just this Friday, we were looking how to capture things like engagement proposals. The solution was fairly simple - create a standardized category called “Proposals” and create an RSS aggregator that captured and centralized all the proposals. However, the information we would be able to capture was fairly limited. I would not be able to sort easily on who we made the proposal to, who was involved with the proposal, whether we won the work. If only we could capture more information.

Enter Structured Blogging and Microformats

The idea behind structured blogging is fairly simple. Instead of getting people to write blog entries, get them to fill out forms which capture information in a structured way. Specifically, that structure will be XML files that conform to microformats. The Microformats organization is going to get to define many commonly
used formats so that it will be easy to make systems work or flow
together.

The diagram below outlines the current Structured Blogging approach. It shows how a blogger will either enter a normal blog post, or they will choose to enter something completely different, such as a review or an event.

For people in the finance world familiar with FpML, the Financial Products XML, the notion of Microformats will be familiar. FpML is a beast capable of defining almost any complex financial instrument or derivatives contract ever invented. FpML is made up of over a thounsand smaller formats, that describe things like a Holiday calendar, a counterparty address and a reference interest rate.

Here’s a good example of a microformat in action:

hCard XML
<div class=“agent vcard”>
    <a class=“email fn” href=“mailto:jfriday@host.com”>Joe Friday</a>
    <div class=“tel”>+1-919-555-7878</div>
    <div class=“title”>Area Administrator, Assistant</div>
</div>

this hCard could be displayed as:

Joe Friday (mailto:jfriday@host.com)

+1-919-555-7878

Area Administrator, Assistant

In my next post, I’ll talk about how this is implemented within MoveableType.

However, despite all the advantages to Microformats, I do have some minor concerns with that way that things are initially being implemented.

I do not like the idea of hundreds of different types of blog entry formats. Enterprise users will find it confusing. Hell, I find it confusing.

Instead, I think that goals of Structured Blogging can be better accomplished with Microformat content being embedded within simple blog posts.

Then, when generating the RSS feeds, the structured content can simply be buried within the kinds of RSS enclosures that are used to hold PodCasts.

Why reinvent the wheel?

I also think this approach will be far more extensible from a UI perspective. Users can then drop any of a thousand structured widgets into their existing blog entries, and even have one entry that has multiple structured widgets.

Here’s a diagram of what I mean.

Will Structured Blogging succeed? I believe the within the enterprise it will be invaluable.

However, there are strong arguments against the current multiple entry type approach to Structured Blogging. Paul Kedrosky says it won’t work because people are lazy and do not
want to go through the pain of learning all these new format types. Stowe Boyd says that all the structure will limit the inherent, and wonderful messiness of the world of blogging.

If structure blogging becomes regular blogging with the occasional drag and drop of structured forms into traditional posts, I think it will succeed in both the open Internet and within the Enterprise.

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