Seb Paquet points to this W3C paper on "Semantic Blogging and Bibliographies." Very cool stuff.
Web logging, or blogging [ESSENTIAL_BLOGGING], is a well known phenomenon that has a number of attractive features. It provides a very low barrier to entry for personal web publishing and yet these personal publications are automatically syndicated and aggregated via centralized servers (e.g. blogger.com) allowing a wide community to access the blogs. Blogs have a simple to understand structure and yet links between blogs and items (so called blog rolling) supports the decentralized construction of a rich information network. While we want to extend the blogging metaphor, we also want to preserve its key values, especially its simplicity. We want to build on blogging's proven potential for publishing, syndication & discovery, and community formation.
This is the kind of thing that the proposed microcontent research center would want to follow--pointing to it, sponsoring similar research, and bringing folks like this to the workshops.
When this quarter is over (end of February), I'll starting working on the microcontent.info web site--even if we don't get funding, I'd like to start moving forward on a repository of information about blog-related research.