"Structured Blogging" spreads. The great experiment starts: Can search engines wrestle bloggers into control?SAN FRANCISCO—Yahoo Inc., America Online Inc. and several other online search giants support a relatively new idea to sync up bloggers with powerful Internet aggregators, says a source.
There are now millions of Weblogs, which are Internet sites spotlighting someone's particular take on a subject or stream of conscious rants on a number of topics. Each are like snowflakes; no two are alike. The one constant: lots of favorite Web locales to click on.
"Structured Blogs" are based on an open standard meant to wrap every blog into a basic format. According to a demonstration of a free software download that's part of the initiative, bloggers work from templates.
Read more here about blogging's enterprise angle.
With every blog based on some standard format, blogs could more easily become part of the traffic aggregated by Internet search engines, RSS news readers or others, say Structured Blog supporters.
The group StructuredBlogging.org said here Monday night that it recently and significantly expanded the kind of Web publishing software that the software can work with.
"Now we give it to the community to work on," said Salim Ismael, co-founder of PubSub Concepts Inc., an Internet publishing firm that's helping to fund the organization. VeriSign Inc. and 38 others are members.
Read here about blogging spam.
The whole idea behind blogging belies structure, so the initiative consisting of Yahoo, AOL and organizers hints that Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.'s online division MSN will chafe a bit as it tries to settle in.
Yet, Internet search engines are motivated because each is increasingly being called upon by customers to find blogs. If they can't deliver, they lose customers.
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