Marc is willing to concede that I am making intellingent arguments against Structured Blogging, although he is not so sure about Paul Kedrovsky:

[from Lazyness, messiness and structure]

I’m happy to see Stowe use intelligent,well thought out reasoning in being skeptical about Structured Blogging.

It makes allot more sense than Paul Kedrovsky’s almost hysterical rantings. I guess Paul has an investment in some company that claims they can automate ‘finding structure meaning’ in content - so having humans index their own content doesn’t help them.

I find I am having a hard time trying to clearly articulate my concerns about SB in a way that people get what I mean. Bob Wyman, in a comment at Marc's post, doesn't buy what I say:

Stowe’s reasoning may not be as well thought out as you suggest. At times, he really seems to be reaching for reasons not to like SB. For instance, he writes: “Personally, I think it will fail because people don’t want their music review to look like everybody else’s…”

Well, it is unquestionable that not everyone will want their content to look like everyone else’s. That would be *very* boring. This is precisely why we’ve seen so many people modify the output templates used by the Structured Blogging extensions. They adjust the templates to conform to the styles of their own blogs. But, what is curious is that even though many folk have customized the visual appearance generated by the SB templates, we don’t see as many people changing the data structures used by the extensions under the cover. Clearly, what we’re seeing is presentation matters much more to people than data encoding formats do… Many people are skilled enough to change the templates while recognizing that there is value in keeping the underlying data structures standardized. This is one of the reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed. It is possible for many people to be creative in presentation while still keeping enough commonality in data storage so that the machines can provide common services.

Yeah, yeah. The superfical look and feel of SB output is not central to my concerns. Its not just that people want their blogs to appear distinctive, but they actually attack issues like classification and ratings differently. Its not a pure mathematical exercise, like converting one person's "three out of four" into another's "7.5 out of 10". People really look at things that they write about and review very differently, and SB's cookie cutterish approach to these sorts of blog writings will tend to overemphasize the value of ratings and other easily extracted metadata relative to the more nuanced thinking buried in text.

And my biggest concerns are the uses that will be made of the metadata. Firms like Pubsub and other aggregregators like the potential of all that metadata, which can be mined in various ways, yeilding all sorts of market information, product and brand indicators, and so on. Mass market thinking.

My paean to messiness is not just about look-and-feel, either. Its really about the effort involved with poking aorund, reading what people are saying, and trying to grasp their point of view and perspective. It's a messy business, messing around with blogs. And I welcome all sorts of widgets and gadgets and even metadata to festoon our blogs with, to help make sense of what's going on. But for some reason, the notion of standardizing the metadata around blog posts, making their context in the world in some way generic, seems to me to devalues the work of being an active reader of blogs. I am supposed to provide my context, or to help create it.

Bob and Marc may be right, and I may be an unreconstructed obstructionist to what will prove to be a great boon for everyone, everywhere. But for the moment, I will continue to dissent on Structured Blogging.