The structured blogging team have released a new version of their structuredblogging.org site. It looks great!

It is worth checking out because it quickly shows both what structured blogging is today. They have some good screen shots. It also includes a roadmap of where they want to take the concept.

The idea behind structured blogging is simple: build microformat based information into blog posts.

Microformats mean that a computer can recognize something as being a “review” or an “event” just as well as a person can.

If every blogger used the “review” microformat, a search engine like Technorati could give you the average rating on each new film. Sounds cool. But you have to get everyone using the same format.

The idea behind structured blogging is to make it easy to use that format. Under structured blogging today, instead hitting a link that says “NEW ENTRY”, you click a link that says “NEW REVIEW” or “NEW EVENT”.

On the open Internet, there are two other benefits, in addition to helping improve search results.

First, if information is in a nice microformat, you can use something like Live Clip to cut and paste an event from a blog into your online calendar. To see what I mean, check out these Live Clip screencasts from Microsoft.

Second, microformats help users to capture and store information in a way that is machine readable. In other words, there is semantic information attached that says things like “this is a review”.

The only problem I see with the specific approach that the Structured Blogging team have taken is that they have tried to replace blog posts, rather than simply embedding structured elements within a blog post.

Here is a mock-up of an alternative approach for Movable Type:

The approach shown above requires creating a more powerful interface and a whole platform to support new structured elements. However, if it was designed well, it should be fairly easy for people to define new structured elements. Ideally, a power user would be able to define a new type of structured element that could be added to the list by creating a simple template, an XLS file and CSS style sheet.

One could easily imagine a whole ecosystem of open-source contributions, just as there is a whole ecosystem of Yahoo! Widgets, Wordpress Themes and Greasemonkey scripts. Here, each contribution would define a new structured element that would help end users embed a microformat snippet within their blog posts.

In an enterprise setting, this could be used to add company specific forms to enterprise blogs, such as client call reports, expense reports, loan forms, and meeting minutes.

Why are structured elements better than entire structured blog entries?

First, people are already used to writing blog posts. Structured elements within blog posts extends what they already do, rather than forcing them to stop what they do and replace it with a different work flow.

Second, you could easily have hundreds of different types of structured elements. Under the current approach to structured blogging, it would be impossible to fit in the links to that many different types of structured posts.

Third, just as there is value in adding the meta data included in microformats, there is value in human readable text that might be wrapped around that microformat. The blog post provides context. For example, I might be writing a post about Web Office, include a reference to another blog, and then include a quick review of that blog.

The structured blogging initiative has gotten off to a fantastic start. With just a few minor changes, I think they could really be on to something very big.