The Syndicate conference in San Francisco saw the re-establishment of discussion on structured blogging, a concept that Jack Schofield of the Guardian technology blog says "has been floating around for the past couple of years without making much headway."

Schofield hopes the Structured Blogging Initiative announced at the San Francisco conference will "kick start a movement."

The concept was defined at the conference as follows: "a new way to organize blog content at the authoring stage so that readers, aggregators and applications can better navigate, sort through and understand that content."

Essentially, the structured blog provides the writer with a micro-format for entries which defines a number of fields that can be filled depending on the type of entry. For example, as Jeff Clavier explains, if one were writing a movie review there would be the following fields to fill: "title, producer, director, actors, etc."

Plug ins have been developped for blog platforms Movable Type and Word Press; for examples see the structured blogging blog.

It has been announced that the Structured Blogging Initiative "will go live Dec 13th as a Wordpress and Moveable Type plug-in. We’ll then followup with Drupal, Mambo, Xanga, Ruby on Rails and .Net and Java versions. Maybe we’ll even figure out how to get it to work with MySpace and LiveJournal. Also we promise that this will support every kind of format there is, in every syndication format, page tag and file format you can think of."

What remains to be seen is how well it will catch on in the blogsphere.

Sources: Guardian Technology Blog, Syndicate conference, Structured Blogging blog, Marc Canter