Using Semantics to Enhance the Blogging Experience

Blogging, as a subset of the web as a whole, can benefit greatly from the addition of semantic metadata. The result — which we will call Semantic Blogging — provides improved capabilities with respect to search, connectivity and browsing compared to current blogging technology. Moreover, Semantic Blogging will allow new ways of convenient data exchange between the actors within the blogosphere — blog authors and blog users alike. This paper identifies structural and content-related metadata as the kinds of semantic metadata which are relevant in the domain of blogging. We present in detail the nature of these two kinds of metadata, and discuss ways of creating such metadata in a convenient and non-obstrusive way for the user, how to publish such metadata on the web, and how to best make use of such metadata from the point of view of a blog consumer.