Mike Malloch's SuprGlu : recent blogging, bookmarking and images / structured blogging/

I wrote the other day about progress towards microformats and structured-blogging support in knotes:

Steve has the Event microformat type working in a test installation now. Another few days should see tests within our main knotes production version. Other special types should be coming thick and fast after that, some of them for very special uses such as within learners' eportfolios, some of more general use. Exciting developments!

More progress to report. The editing interfaces and scripts have matured - for instance objectless-editing is now possible (so that users can safely and swiftly invoke the editor formlets and then change their minds) and Steve has a generic macro-based way to creating the formlets. New formats are also supported in his tests: hreview, and our own google-video-clip format (we have clients who are putting workplace-learning video clips into google-video and we want to make it easy to embed the information and players for these in our own content).

This development strand is especially important for our planned e-portfolio work, and for anyone wanting to make it easy to add special kinds of structured content in their weblogs. Watch this space for more progress reports.

I've mentioned a few times recently that we're working towards using microformats / structured-blogging to allow users to represent special kinds of content within their knotes weblog entries. There are many reasons for taking this route: it allows users to see content-creation as more homogeneous and spontaneous; it represents special content structure in interoperable machine-readable formats; it allows us to generalise the notion of special content types from the point of view of knotes' own interfaces and leave the details to special-type plugins...

The first few special structurings we'll be looking at are: event, google-video clip and embedded RSS, after which we'll be looking at variants on review. See my earlier post in elearning2.0 for a sketch of the merits of embedding live RSS to augment a blog entry (eg as reference list or background-resource links ). See this post in the work-related learning blog for an illustration of embedding google-video content in blog content. Event as a structured-blogging type should be pretty obvious: roughly, it takes the place of the Plone 'Event' content type allowing users to denote upcoming events in an ad-hoc but machine-readable way so that they integrate with portal calendar and can be aggregated into iCal syndication.

Events as microformats embedded in the blog content have the additional advantage that 3rd party harvesters can discover the event-wise information directly from the rendered html / rdf of the blog entry.

Steve has the Event microformat type working in a test installation now. Another few days should see tests within our main knotes production version. Other special types should be coming thick and fast after that, some of them for very special uses such as within learners' eportfolios, some of more general use. Exciting developments!