Thank you...

I'm really looking forward to what comes out of this project. The problem with structured data in your syslog log now is that every program does it differently and is therefore useless. We now have the opportunity you make a standard structure that can be supported everywhere.

A seriously, many many applications don't use syslog directly but some kind of wrapper, which allows you to say:

logfunction(severity, fmtstring, args...)

Look! Structure! Imagine being able to search log messages like: "all message of level NOTICE with 'sda' as an argument". Use the MD5 of the format string as ID and you've got something that people using translated programs can do something with. You could even translate your logs to another language after the fact.

Or, show the IP fields of all records with "Traceback" in the message.

Hurrah!