Structured Blogging Plus DITA - Authoring Online Help Without A HAT

I’ve been thinking about the many ways that Structured Blogging might be employed to help technical writers and other content creators do what they do better, faster, and cheaper. Structured Blogging is a new concept in the technical communication and content management fields. And, it often doesn’t make much sense until you take some time to explore the concepts and ponder the possibilities, something I’ve been doing for the past several months.

What is Structured Blogging?
According to organizers, “Structured Blogging is all about giving bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information, such as reviews and events...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.”

As of this writing, there are two Structured Blogging plugins available for popular blogging tools—one for users of Movable Type, the other for users of Wordpress. Using these plugins makes it easy to create, edit, and maintain different kinds of structured posts—content that adheres to a specific structure, but was created without the need for XML authoring tools and associated DTDs and style sheets.

Structured blogging is important to technical communicators because it’s a movement toward widespread use of structured microcontent, empowering bloggers to create reusable content and publish it in a machine-readable format that can be shared easily and automatically with others, opening the door for the creation of more useful online services. Technical writing teams have been adopting the structured authoring approach to content creation, but until recently, there have been little choice in how structured content is created. Until the advent of structured blogging, content creators have had to rely on commercial and open source XML authoring software and help authoring tools (HATs), but that may soon be changing.

Structured Blogging Meets Technical Writing
I’ve got a few ideas how technical writers could use Structured Blogging to create structured content, but by far my best idea is the creation of a basic online help creation, maintenance, and delivery system that utilizes a blogging tool as the authoring interface. An online help plug-in would need to be developed for the blogging tool. It would likely be based on a subset of the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Writers would simply fire up a web browser, login to their blogging tool, select “Create a new help topic” and populate the supplied web-based form. Writers would be prompted to enter the title of the topic, a short description, and step-by-step instructions to complete the task. They would also assign the help topic to a category (something blogging tools already do) so that related topics could be easily located with the click of the mouse. The idea still has some kinks in it, but I’m working with the folks at Structured Blogging to develop a use case designed to educate and excite blogging tool plug-in developers.

I’m moderating a session on structured blogging at both the upcoming Gilbane Conference on Content Management in San Francisco later this month, and at the Syndicate Conference in New York in May. There’s a lot of interest in using blogging tools to create structured, syndicatable content. AOL, Yahoo, Google and others are no doubt developing strategies to address the popularity of blogging and the possibilities structured blogging presents.

Help authoring software vendors—already fighting for marketshare—will likely not be thrilled to hear of the availability of free structured blogging plug-ins designed to allow users to create basic online help topics without the need for a HAT. However, I believe that structured blogging help plug-ins will become a reality. They will provide a much needed option for content creators who may find this type of solution meets their busines requirements.

I’d like to hear what you think about structured blogging and its potential impact on technical communication. Let me know your views by leaving a comment.

More to come…

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