SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 5, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- Web 2.0 Conference -- PubSub, the essential prospective search tool for tracking what people are saying about the topics they care about, today announced its funding of an open-source development project to bring Structured Blogging to the major blogging platforms. The universal Structured Blogging format is designed to make it easier to publish and find information on the Web. Structured Blogging lets users add different styles and tags to each type of blog entry that they post. These styles and tags ensure that movie and book reviews don't look like calendar or journal entries, and that each content type can be quickly recognized and processed by automated search services and other applications.
Structured Blogging is an easy way for publishers to create data-rich entries, like book reviews or calendar announcements, and tag them so that all online services can easily extract data from them. Structured Blogging frees data from the need for traditional "walled garden" services. Now anyone can build applications or services based on the structure of an entry. Using Structured Blogging, job listings can be created, posted, searched, and found by any service; buyers and sellers of goods can publish what they want to buy or sell and have those posts searched and listed by any number of search services.
"Structured Blogging is an almost trivially simple idea that has the capacity to be one of the most disruptive Internet technologies of the next few years," said Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub Concepts, Inc. "Structured Blogging, as PubSub proposes it, focuses on the publisher of the data by providing a format that is more interesting and visually appealing, while relying on existing, proven, and widely available methods to permit applications to access the data content of blog postings."
PubSub is working with Broadband Mechanics, a San Francisco-based digital lifestyle aggregation company to expand PubSub's Structured Blogging prototype. "A new era of blogging is emerging -- where structured data is really important and new ways of sharing and indexing this structured data will become crucial," said Marc Canter, CEO of Broadband Mechanics, LLC. "Whether it be events, reviews or people -- structured data and the standards surrounding it will lead us to new kinds of applications and services. The Structured Blogging tool set will become an important vehicle for not only creating these new kinds of structured data, but also in establishing clear standards -- schemas -- to exchange this structured data between various systems tools and applications."
How Structured Blogging works:
Structured Blogging makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of posts and is very similar to an edit form on a blog. The difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, and add links and pictures for reviews.
Once Structured Blogging is in place, users can start building applications on top of it. Because it's an XML format and embedded in both the HTML blog and the syndicated feed, applications can run in Web browsers, like a Firefox plugin for comparison shopping which reads product reviews; aggregators, such as those that add your friends' calendar entries to your date book; or Web services like a feed for everyone attending the same conference.
"Structured Blogging provides a standard format for bloggers to publish an event out to the Web in an organized and predictable way," said Joe Reger, founder, Reger.com, a user-friendly blogging platform with all of the benefits of traditional blogging, plus a data mining tool called datablogging. "We help our clients use the structured formats without the need for programming. Executives can simply drag and drop the data into a log, then track, chart, and analyze the data without ever involving IT services. Given its ability to openly share data with tools like datablogging, we see Reger.com plus Structured Blogging as a critical publishing piece in the larger concept of Web 2.0."
"With Structured Blogging, we'll be able to post structured items in any of millions of blogs or Web sites and have those items recognized, indexed, and searched on any number of search sites, just like HTML pages are today," continued Wyman. "With this innovation, we foresee a beneficial paradigm shift in the marketplace. Rather than simply relying on the data they've captured in the walled gardens, popular sites will focus more on the broader service offerings they provide."
Structured Blogging support will initially be provided for the WordPress, MoveableType, Drupal, and Reger.com blogging platforms. Other platforms will be supported in the future. Learn more about Structured Blogging at http://structuredblogging.org/.
About the PubSub.com Service:
PubSub.com provides a free prospective search service that continuously monitors more than 16 million blogs and syndicated Web sites, over 50,000 newsgroups, all SEC Edgar Filings, press releases from major wire services, earthquake data from the U.S. Geological Survey, and FAA airport delay information to instantly alert users whenever material events occur. PubSub's prospective search provides a real-time notification service made possible by PubSub's proprietary "matching engine" which, each day, performs hundreds of billions of matches between subscriber requests and newly-published items.
About PubSub Concepts, Inc.
PubSub Concepts, Inc. is a New York-based company founded in 2002. The company develops Internet-scale Publish/Subscribe systems and plans a series of product releases designed to make prospective searching a vital element of the Internet experience. Visit http://www.pubsub.com for more information.