This is pretty neat– Structured Blogging is a Wordpress and Movable Type plugin that makes it easy and convenient to create nicely formatted and machine readable blog posts for different types of content– events, for-sale ads, etc.

Machine readability is provided by a number of supported microformats – microformats are a very lightweight way to embed machine readable data in XHTML markup.

The benefit to you as a user is that content formatted in this way is not only easy to create and looks good but becomes easily indexable and searchable by crawlers. For instance, rather than having to post your conference announcements to a host of different sites, you could just post it to your blog. Crawlers could automatically and reliably read the conference title, dates, organizer, etc. and make it available on their site.

Installation was easy and trouble free for me — just drop the files into your Wordpress installation.

Structured Blogging adds a number of new post types into Wordpress (reviews, events, lists, audio, video, people and group showcases, etc.)

Each different post type provides a customized form for the type of data relevant to that posting. Several of the forms have some whizzy AJAX going on, like in the in-place search in the reviews form.

The resulting post for a conference has a nicely formatted table describing the conference information in addition to your post about the conference. Round-tripping works well- when you go back to edit the post Wordpress continues to use the appropriate specialized form.

Structured Blogging is free and supports Wordpress and Movable Type, I think it has great potential. As a blog author, I’d much rather post the things i care about to my blog and let Googlebase and other sites pick them up with their structure intact, rather than having to post in multiple places.