Standards initiative for blog aggregation and applications

One of the problems with blogs is that posts can have any, or no, structure. So, for example, my blog post about a DVD review might include the running time and the certificate. Your DVD reviews might instead offer a star rating and a genre classification. This inconsistency makes the work of automatic aggregation into a DVD review site very difficult. Likewise its very challenging to do intelligent filtering (e.g notify me of all reviews of Jim Carey's films in the non-comedy genre) .

It also means that collectively as bloggers our film reviews don’t get reach their full potential audiences.

RSS does not help here – it merely makes it possible pass our reviews around amazingly easily but cannot do anything to deal with the lack of a common structure.

Structured blogging is a not-for profit initiative intended to address this which is supported by a number of players and announced at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco earlier this week (December 13).

Structured Blogging has a very credible set of supporters but there are also those who are more cautious about its prospects, such as Stowe Boyd of Corante, who believe that it is a top-down approach to blog standards which is less likely to succeed than a more bottom-up approach such as microformats or blogspeak.

Bioteams Books Reviews

Organisational teams: thin slice for responsiveness

January 22, 2007 | article by Ken Thompson in Book Reviews (37)

Humans and animals do not need complete information to act; they can operate on various clues provided there is a sufficient context. Organizational teams can also use this thin slicing technique in conjunction with short messaging to enhance their performance. Malcolm Gladwell’s introspective book Blink digs deep into the abyss of human cognition to illustrate the human ability to think at a subconscious level. The idea of thin slicing is used where one is introduced to only a few snippets of information which lead to a series of conclusions based on moments of rapid cognition – an ability claimed to be intrinsically dormant in most humans. By bioteams guest author Max Bhanabhai.

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