March 2005

Sorry for creating a new term, but I couldn’t resist. This term describes blog structures which is indicative of structured blogging.

There have been some interesting discussions floating around about structured blogging, so I invented a [lame] term to describe it. It’s a pretty simple concept - create classes (or types) of blog posts that are designed to carry data or other types of information related to the post. Armed with this ability, bluctures could be used to create blog applications that co-mingle primary data with your blog content. For example, you could have a blog post that has a form for task information, or perhaps a phone log. Imagine a blog structure that tracks your current GEO location when you make a post - perfect for travel-blogs.

In my own company (and technology) this concept has been in use for more than a few years. When we designed our corporate blog platform, we envisioned precisely these kinds of use cases. We use blog posts as the basis for competitive intelligence data, search results, and even quality assurance report results.

Imagine the use cases for PR and journalism…

- Use a private/secure blog to author story snippets as you research and keep a record of your contacts and sources.

- Blog your thoughts about new ideas and rate each idea with an embedded [graphic] data tool.

Use your imagination…

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For a bit of fun and what I loosely call research, I hit Technorati every few weeks and search for “I hate my job”. Some very interesting results show up. Personal blogs from Blogger, Journalspace and AOL Journals make up the majority of the results.

Many of the posts are from younger individuals who blog about their disdain for their hourly wage jobs, others are from people that seem sincerely depressed with their lot in life.

This week’s pick: Heather who hates working in the ‘dreaded’ gift shop at the Historical Society

These personal blogs by young employees probably represent the biggest PR issue for large corporations. Most 16 or 17 year olds don’t realize that what they write in their ‘personal journal’ is being indexed by sites such as Technorati and can be found easily by their employers and journalists.

I have a friend that works at a large retail chain in the PR department. For the most part their company is very low on the radar in blogs. Recently though when I did a search in Technorati for the company name I came across a blog post from a teenager who had just started working their. In his post he detailed the training program and videos they watched as part of orientation. His comments were not very flattering.

He doesn’t work there anymore.

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