Structured Blogging is all about giving bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information, such as reviews and events. For example, let’s say that I write a review of a piece of software on my Wordpress blog and someone else writes a review in their Movable Type blog. Not only are these two posts structured differently, with the blogging platforms writing different code, but each tool has customizable templates so that the blogger can write any code they want. So even though the content is nearly the same, the probability that the code in the end results looks anything similiar is very small. Structured blogging would enable us and software to compare two postings on different websites if the structure is similar, we would have that ability. If both of these reviews were written into the same XML format, search engines and blog aggregators could recognize that they were of similar kind, and could provide a targeted service that aggregates reviews and only reviews. And this idea works equally well for any other structure you might dream up: classifieds, event listings, recipes. The promise of structured content is that we would have an explosion of software aggregating it into useful, specialized services. Think recommendation systems.

It's very similar to the default publishing form in blog software like Wordpress or MT, except that the structure will let you easily add specific styles to each type - including links and pictures for reviews.

The difference between a typical blog post and a structured entry is that the Structured Blogging content is published in machine-readable format, so that other services can understand it. Indeed it builds on RSS and Atom standards.

For more information on structured blogging please go to http://structuredblogging.org/.