In case you missed an earlier post about Blox, this is the software that will run our new Web site. It means that we can have a much richer Web site, full of interweaving stories, extra features and beautiful photos.

Blox also means a lot of work. We are scheduled to go live March 2. There’s a lot of work to do between now and then to make sure that all the little bugs are worked out of the site (or as many of them as we can catch by launch day).

For the reporters, this will mean some Blox training before March 2. What will that training entail? It’s hard to say at this point because we have yet to make some preliminary decisions on what the workflow around the new site will look like in the newsroom. I’ll let you know more when there’s more to know.

You can see the site any time you like. Just stop by my desk and ask for a peek. I won’t spoil the surprise for the public by posting a image, though. Sorry.

Estimates say that we could be live next month. That means a lot of work to get things streamlined. I’ll be writing a big ol’ manual for our Blox site and meeting with the people who will be working with the news side of the site to determine just how we’ll divvy up the work of getting articles into Blox.

This much is certain: The Web site will be much more complex. It will no longer be possible to rely on just the night people in the newsroom to take care of the site at the end of the day. We all have to think about the Web now.

Microformats have been around for a few years. They are basically little libraries of tags that can be wrapped around content online to help make that content more easily readable by machines. The benefit of this is that most of these tags are semantic, meaning that when a computer reads the content, it will be able to tell, from the microformat tags, whether the text it’s reading is a headline, a byline or even a postal code.

Imagine this: you visit one of your favorite news sites and the homepage displays a notification that an article you read yesterday has been updated with new information, and a story you read last week has been corrected. The notification enables you to click on a link and read the correction, or to be taken to the updated story.

After checking those items, you continue reading articles on the site, and each story includes a box of information explaining the type of sourcing used within the story (anonymous, etc.), as well as a link to the organization’s relevant policies and standards. If you spot an error in an article, you can easily submit a request for correction via that same info-box. And if the article is corrected, you’ll receive a notification during a future visit to the site.

(Via Columbia Journalism Review)

Neat, huh? hNews should be built in to our new Blox-based Web site. We’ll have to see what TownNews will allow us to do with it.

That means that within a week or two, we’ll start to get a sense of what it will be like to work in the new system, and it will be different than the way things work now. I can’t tell you exactly how things will differ yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.

Microformats are ways of coding content to make it clear to readers, both human and machine, what that content is. For example, the text that makes up a byline is coded as a byline. The text that makes up a headline is coded as a headline, and so on. That way, when machines read the content, they will be better able to parse it (display it) for human readers, and computers will be able to extract better meaning from search results because the content will have meaning built into it.

hNews is one of many microformats in use on the Web today. It is, as TownNews reports, not proprietary. It is owned neither by TownNews nor by the Associated Press. The hNews microformat is an open standard, just like many of the other core technologies the Web depends on, such as HTML, CSS and PHP.

Todd Martin, vice president for technology and director of the AP news registry, said in the release that the hNews microformat “provides a consistent and higher fidelity way of presenting news online and enables the semantic interpretation of news for humans and machines.” He added that hNews allows publishers to add tags and other metadata to their content “to improve the user experience, attract audiences and advertisers, and facilitate searching for specific types of content.”