You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy.

So Joshua Porter and I thought we'd give Marc Canter and Joe Reger a chance to respond to some of the criticisms and further explain what all this Structured Blogging was about in this podcast. (Part 1 notes and link below, Part 2 tomorrow).

About our guests: Marc Canter is CEO of Broadband Mechanics. Marc co-founded MacroMind in 1984 that later became Macromedia (now merged with Adobe) and also co-founder of Ourmedia.org. Joe Reger started Reger.com a datablogging service in 2003.

I was great fun to do - Marc has a 'tell it as it is' style - not shy in the slightest(!)  - thanks to Marc and Joe for their time today.  I learnt a great deal more by talking to them and challenging them with some of the quotes from posts that criticized the Structured Blogging idea. From speaking to Marc and Joe today I'd say there are some misunderstandings 'out there' about the SB idea, so I hope the critics at least hear these responses in the podcast and look forward to their responses.

Marc Canter (pic courtesy of Robert Scoble)

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Part 1 (.mp3, 37 minutes, 35mb)

(note: 'bah!...'technical challenges' have forced me to do a fair amount of post editing - the recording got insanely out of sync, which meant everybody was fine to hear except for me, so I've had to delete most of what I said / asked (porbably a good thing ;-), but hopefully it all flows ok...have been v.careful to ensure the necessary editing did not change any 'meaning')

  • Intro: News of Structured Blogging
  • What are the goals of Structured Blogging? (04:45)
  • A new era of blogging (06:20)
  • Sébastien Paquet's 'Towards structured blogging', 2003 (08:30)
  • Anil Dash's 'Introducing the Microcontent Client' 2002 (09:00)
  • PubSub's structured blogging initiative (10:10)
  • Response to quote from Paul Kedrosky's post, 'Structured Blogging will Flop' (13:30):

    "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:

      1. People are lazy
      2. People are lazy
      3. People are lazy

    The intelligence belongs in the network and in the algorithms"

  • Top 10 reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed (15:10)
  • Those damn capitalists! (20:10)
  • 20:45 random call
  • We're talking about tens of millions of people. 23:00
  • Respond to quote from Greg Yardley's post, 'Structured Blogging as Web 2.0 Colonialism' (23:45)

    "In my more pessimistic moments, I suspect that the omission of a payment mechanism is deliberate, and that the biggest proponents of Structured Blogging are just looking for new ways to aggregate a lot of content, use it to build up a valuable userbase, and sell, generating nothing for us-plain-folks but ‘a bigger megaphone."

  • Structured Blogging is a compatibility box (25:45)
  • Microcontent description (MCD) (27:00)
  • Standards innovation (27:50)
  • Structured Blogging's future: a dynamic web service: (29:00)
  • SB Spam and the Identity Gang (32:40)
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