Microformats

Microformats = a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Microformats are meant to enable microcontent publishing, the postmedia mode of writing in microchunks, which can then be re-used and shared in a variety of ways.

For example, book reviews could be more efficiently collated if there was a uniform way to recognize them through microformats.

"Microformats are embedded into webpages and discovered by search engines like Google or Technorati. Microformats are creating common definitions for "What is a review or event? What are the specific fields in the data structure?" They can also specify what we can do with all this information." (Marc Canter at http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=12412_0_1_0_C)

Microformats for Business

"In my reckoning, there are two business propositions right now in microformats: 1) Structuring data for search and business intelligence, already successfully demonstrated by technorati; 2) Structuring content for collaboration, likely monetized through a service similar to BasecampHQ.

Microformats are really just a way to combine human and machine readability in one web page. Microformats are superior to similar infrastructure plays because the average web designer can incorporate them with very little work.

So, what's the business proposition for combining human and machine readability? Right now, I can come up with two.

The most obvious is structuring content for search and business intelligence. For instance, technorati has raised its own search visibility with the reltag microformat. By helping determine the relevance of given content, reltag also enhances technorati's ability to sell its index data for market intelligence.

A less obvious business proposition for microformats is structuring content for collaboration. Over the past month, I've been having conversations with Mike Migurski of reblog fame and various others including Mark Rickerby and Lucas Gonze. In these conversations, we have focused on microformats as easily identified packets of information inside of web pages.

With the right infrastructure, people could pass these packets around and share them. Mike Migurski and his team are already doing this with full blog posts using reblog." (http://www.unmediated.org/archives/2005/08/microformats_in.php)

More information:

More information at http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page and http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/MicroFormats