I'm a hands-on person. If you start talking to me about the what's-its and the who-dads of something in technical jargon I don't quite get, my eyes start to glaze over and you've lost me. At the same time, I'm quite guilty of talking with other people in my industry in language that would make the average person think I've just landed from outer space. And yet, we techie types still talk this way with each other, because it's hard to discuss technology without speaking in technical terms. I bring all this up because I'm going to attempt to explain Structured Blogging to you within a MyST Blogsite™ by keeping as much to plain English as possible. However, if you're not familiar with blogging, I may sound like my true geek self. In that case, call us up and someone smarter than me will be happy to make it a bit plainer than this. So here goes. On the most basic level, structured blogging applies a uniform look and feel to blog posts in the form of templates, allowing you to incorporate events and formatted items such as reviews. Within the MyST Blogsitetm platform, it goes a bit further than templating - existing data from your company can be incorporated and reused. The MyST version of Structured Blogging makes your blog posts intelligent, not just templated. Here's some of what it does: - It can bring in a template for your post with a single click.
- Because it uses XML, it can export elements to other applications - the information about a real estate listing I blog about could be exported to Google Base.
- It lets you use more than one template if you like.
- When data gets old - like an open house - it can expire.
- It lets you import and manipulate existing data.
So back in the real world, what does this mean to the real estate professional? It means you can create posts about individual properties in a format that can be exported to other systems, and publicize your property on other sites across the web. It means that when visitors come to your site, they can tell at a glance which posts are about specific properties, and which are general information posts. It means that the data you use for one post can be saved and repeated in another post, without repeatedly being typed again. It also means that informaton that won't be relevant after a certain point, such as a calendared event, can automagically disappear, while still leaving an intact post behind. In the next post, I'll dream about ways other industries could use structured blogging. | 
