By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

I am making this my first New Year’s Resolution and I will stick to it. I will. I will.

The resolution is to be an advocate for structured data on the web. I will sing it from the mountain tops and whisper it from the valleys. Well, I might yodel it in both places but I certainly will be vocal.

In the great quest for efficiency online it is time we move beyond the 19% of websites that have XML feeds that structure the sites data to a full onslaught of education for web publishers. The semantic web is depending on it.

The semantic web is in a gestational state and no where near reaching its potential to revolutionize the way that we interact with information. The tech certainly isn’t there yet in the capacity of computing and the redundancy and review that needs to be applied to content for fully actualized linking.

What is apparent however, is that about 81% percent of the web is missing its opportunity to hop on this dog pile of ever growing linked data with information from the publisher and not just the bots that are crawling it. There is much information that can be gleaned from microformats within certain publishing platforms but there is still a mass of information that goes without inclusion into the structured whole.

As part of this resolution I will continue to push for RSS feeds since they are the simplest technology to get up and running when it comes to websites. There are tons of tools available to the put feeds on any site and every blogging platform today offers something in the way of feeds either with Atom, RSS or custom XML.

The time has come to bring data together and prepare for the long tail that awaits in a decade from now. Consider adding structured data to your site now like adding it to a time capsule. And instead of it being an 8-track requiring a special player it is more like a stone tablet with the language of the people – or the machine.

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