Google to obviate the need for structured blogging

No sooner has Charlene Li called Google Calendar a platform for "time" applications than the hackers prove the point. Conor O'Neill and Justin Mason both point to the third-party user scripts that facilitate the convenient addition of published events to your calendar. I followed Conor's instructions and then visited the event notification in his personal blog for the Bandon Farmer's Market. Sure enough the Google Calendar button appeared at the bottom of the entry and two clicks later the information was in my own calendar. This was a light bulb moment even for someone who has been reading about Structured Blogging and Microformats for quite a while.

Then Robin Blandford went and 'ruined' my moment of enlightenment by telling me that Google had enabled Gmail and Gcal integration. So I emailed myself an invite (sad isn't it) to dinner on Wednesday and shortly after it appeared in my Gmail with a little calendar icon in the right hand sidebar for "Add to calendar". Clicking on that added the item as expected with event date, duration and location all entered automagically.

So, if Google can process the natural language expression of event information so expertly in an email then surely they can do so on a blog post. Perhaps the information extraction is not yet so precise as the processing of a hCalendar entry but one of the things that vexes me about Structured Blogging is..... well, the structure! By and large the only structure humans normally adhere to in writing is grammatical structure and anything beyond that seems artificial and unnatural.

Search engines are evolving into natural language processing engines so, as much as I love the Greasemonkey hCalendar trick I can only think of structured blogging a useful but short lived hack.

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