"In the quest to make the Web more structured, Yahoo Local now supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews, said Yahoo's Andy Baio (below) during a workshop on decentralizing data at Supernova. [...]"

Am now in the 'Engaged Markets' workshop at Supernova and will blog that soon.

Update: I wrote up some thoughts regarding the microformat news on my ZDNet blog, in a post entitled Yahoo and Microsoft support microformats - what chance Google?.

The actual number of hListing's Yahoo! put out there was 26,456,448, as well as an additional 6,500 hCard listings describing merchants. "This bumper injection of structured data into Kelkoo’s pages makes it ripe for re-use, be that browser extensions to draw out product information on our pages, indexing services aggregating product listings together or mashing up the data for reuse in widgets," said developer Ben Ward of Yahoo! Europe.

Ward also indicated that Yahoo! hoped that other sites would adopt the hListing microformat. "After years of waiting for technology to move the web forward, it’s happening. There’s information our there now to pull of functionality we never had before. As web developers, there’s little to do but slip in microformatted mark-up wherever we can, and start having fun in consuming it," he said.

So what use would microformats be in a web browser?

Alex explains that microformats will make the Web Browser into an "Information Broker" and suggests that this could happen in Firefox 3. He writes:

"Much in the same way that operating systems currently associate particular file types with specific applications, future Web browsers are likely going to associate semantically marked up data you encounter on the Web with specific applications, either on your system or online. This means the contact information you see on a Web site will be associated with your favorite contacts application, events will be associated with your favorite calendar application, locations will be associated with your favorite mapping application, phone numbers will be associated with your favorite VOIP application, etc."
(emphasis mine)

This is an excellent vision and fits perfectly into the 'best of breed' web apps world that we advocate on R/WW. Instead of using the entire product suite of a Google or an MSN or a Yahoo, you can instead use the particular apps you like most from not only big players - but small startups too. So say I use the 30Boxes online calendar - Firefox 3 would automagically transfer any (microformatted) events data I come across while browsing, into my 30Boxes account. And it could likewise put all my contacts into Gmail, locations into Yahoo Maps, phone numbers into Skype, etc.

Mitchell Baker from Mozilla calls this "data-browsing" in another post. And Alex has links to more info on Mozilla's microformats project on this page. I particularly enjoyed this discussion of which microformats Firefox 3 might support. Alex noted in that post:

"Detecting information in Web pages and handing that information off to other applications changes the role of the Web browser from being solely a HTML renderer to being an information broker."

As of now, there is a Firefox addon called Operator, a microformat detection extension developed by Michael Kaply at IBM. So the seeds have started to be sowed.

If Mozilla proceeds with this goal for Firefox 3 to be a broker of information, then that will significantly raise the stakes in the browser war again. Microsoft will surely follow and the smaller browsers will innovate around microformats to keep ahead. And it makes perfect sense for the web browser to do brokering, because information is so fluid and 'small pieces loosely joined' these days. There's a best of breed app for every data type - so why not use the best app where possible?

Here's an image from Mozilla illustrating the idea:

Large Image

What do you think - is this going to change the browser game significantly?

HNews, which is an extension of the hAtom format, only requires content users to specify information about the source organization. In addition, publishers can specify geo-information, a dateline element, license information and information about the code of ethics that governed the behavior of the author of a given site. At its most basic level, hNews, just like other microformats like hCard or hCalendar, allows search engines spiders to identify and read semantic information that would otherwise be buried within a text and would be hard to identify for search engines.

The Good and the Bad

It's noteworthy that the AP, which has had a rather contemptuous relationship with the Internet, would push this standard, which would only make it easier for search engines and mash-up tools to discover and classify content. At the same time, though, hNews is also a central part of the AP's controversial 'news registry' project, which is meant to track AP content across the web and to make sure that it is not misappropriated.

While the hNews microformat is definitely an interesting development, we can't help but wonder about its role in the AP registry project. Today's hNews press release makes no mention of this project (unlike the press release that announced the registry), so there is some hope that the AP has given up on this scheme or is at least trying to downplay hNews' importance in it.

For those of you not familiar with Structured Blogging, it's an initiative that gives bloggers the tools to create and syndicate structured information - such as reviews and events. Kind of like what edgeio is doing commercially. Indeed I've always seen edgeio and SB as being highly complementary. I anticipate that a whole raft of other aggregators will emerge over the next few years, to collect structured data over the Web. Imagine an edgeio for reviews, or an open events aggregator. It's all about the edge, baby!

Structured Blogging is also about providing tools for using microformats, so you don't have to be a geek to use them ;-). SB.org currently offers two plugins for the popular blogging platforms Movable Type and Wordpress. In the future, we hope to see SB integrated into hosted platforms like Typepad and wordpress.com.

I'd recommend looking at the new Roadmap if you're at all interested in where Structured Blogging is going. Marc Canter largely created the roadmap, with input from the PubSub and BBM teams. Here's a snippet from it:

"In Part 2 of the Structured Blogging project, we want to enable people to DO things with microformats. Structured Blogging is all about providing end-users with solutions, enabling them to use microformats and microcontent. We're in the era of the 'Live Web' (or Web 2.0), which is about content applications and services that utilize the Web platform. But to make the Live Web work, we need compatible schemas and APIs to mesh all our apps and services together. There are a lot of missing links currently in the Live Web, which is where Structured Blogging can help."

Finally, if you're a blogger wondering: what's in it for me? Check out the new Benefits page. It's a great starting point.

Microformats are one thing that the browser notices while serving up web pages. This type of markup designating certain types of information has just begun to be leveraged in real use cases. Alex Faaborg, Principle Designer on the Firefox team, has some interesting ideas about how the browser could leverage the microformatted information it comes across.

These are a few of the conceptual mock-ups he showed in his presentation; they aren't planned features - but it sure would be cool if they became reality.

Location

The gist of this idea is that information marked up with microformats as locations, events, etc. on pages around the web could be aggregated by Firefox and made available for viewing in other applications. Information made machine readable with the right markup could be passively captured and reused in different contexts to add new value. That's a pretty smart idea.

In this first mock-up you can see a user doing a search across multiple sites for apartments for rent. The browser captures all the locations viewed in the sidebar for organizing and viewing elsewhere.

In this next image you can see one resulting use case for the data captured above: viewing browsed addresses together in Google Earth.

Events

Location is just one type of microformat. Another is events listings. In the mock-up below, the browser has captured all of the events listings in a user's browsing history and made them available as a "ghost calendar" in Google Calender. Just a reminder - that event you stumbled across is happening later today!

Other types of microformats include designation of people, reviews, tags and more. All these item types could be pulled out of a person's browsing history and analyzed or viewed in new and different ways. There are websites and services doing this already but for the browser to do it too is a very interesting idea.

Firefox is a dynamic and widely used collection of software for which the future is wide open. This idea of capturing and leveraging microformats across applications is one of our favorite proposed directions for the future. The browser already sees this data, so doing something with it makes a whole lot of sense. To follow these and other ideas, check out Alex Faaborg's blog at Mozilla.

Firefox sunglasses image via Photobucket

Why Firefox 3?

The folks at Last.fm felt that Firefox 3 offers many improvements over Firefox 2 regarding general navigation and performance, which will make it a better browser for across the board usage, music included. Specifically, though, new features like bookmark tagging and microformats could lend themselves to the development of great, next-generation music plugins.

Bookmark tagging lets you easily separate your links into categories. As with tagging on Last.fm, this could give you fine-grained control over your links, which could allow you to organize your links by music genre or type of music site.

Another new feature for Firefox 3 is native support for microformats. This functionality will be exposed to extension developers so they can take advantage of music-related microformats like hAudio and hPlaylist. Not only will this allow for new types of music plugins, but it should help spread the adoption of music (and other) microformats by publishers.

Of course, Last.fm is also likely betting on the fact that with the development of music apps for Firefox, more users will discover the Last.fm web site and services. Recently, the site launched a showcase of Last.fm apps, built using Last.fm's free tools at http://build.last.fm. This addition to the site added 19 million new users to the Last.fm user base as of January. A host of popular Firefox extensions could bring even more music fans to sign up for the service.

Currently, there are not many Firefox add-ons featuring Last.fm - a search on the add-ons site revealed only six. Meanwhile, on the build site at Last.fm, there were well over 100 apps. Developers looking for inspiration may want to consider starting there to find ideas.

The winner of the contest will be flown to the Last.fm office in London to meet the team behind the service and will attend a Last.fm/Presents live event as a guest of Last.fm. They will also receive a Logitech Squeezebox network music player.

Google is making some bold moves to bring structured data into the mainstream search box. And in the process, it appears to be running over the top of microformats, the Web community's open standards for structured data. Not to mention the challenge this will ultimately represent to eBay.

According to a PC Advisor report, Google plans to extend the product search capabilities on its main Google.com search engine in the fourth quarter. The main change is in product search, where Google Base will be brought to the fore. When a product search is done on Google.com, users will be presented with another search box to refine their query (like an 'advanced search'). After the user refines their query, Google takes them to a second page populated with product results from the Google Base listings service - i.e. from structured product data. This is already happening with real estate queries, but will be expanded into other product types.

"Ranking will be determined by the attributes that the sellers listed for the product as well as by relevancy," according to analysts at the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance (PESA) Summit in San Francisco this week (where the news broke).

Google has no plans to monetise this product-search capability with display ads or listing fees - but that could change.

Beyond Froogle: shopping in the search box

The plan also involves de-emphasizing Froogle as a destination website and moving its comparison-shopping capabilities to Google.com, because most product searches happen on Google.com. Although Danny Sullivan thinks Google will still need a standalone shopping search brand.

PC Advisor summarized:

"From the beginning, Google said that Base isn't meant as a destination website, but more like a database to feed information to Google search sites, like Google.com. To stress this point, Google recently removed the search box from the Google Base site."

Google Base as a database of structured data has had the potential to be disruptive to Google search ever since it was released. If what was reported from the eBay conference is on the mark, then this will be a significant upgrade to Google Search (or perhaps enhancement is the better term).

Like Steve Rubel, I wonder if this is putting Google on a collision course with eBay. But then I never underestimate the power of a centralized and focused community like eBay (as edgeio is finding out).

Implications for marketers

Fergus Burns of Nooked and John Battelle have both discussed Google Base recently. From the Nooked blog:

"To push the envelope out a bit, people should pay attention to what Google are up to.

The Google Base project is the key to marketers. This quote from a recent analyst conference call with Google management on Google Base

“Through that integration, the overall Google experience will become much more structured, much more refined, and much more precise. It’s a real improvement in end-user quality.”

John Battelle has 2 great examples - Real Estate and Travel of what this looks like in Google Search."

As Fergus summarized, marketers will need to offer feeds on a per product/brand/category basis and support additional attributes from google base and microformats.

Where to for microformats?

The big question in all this is how microformats (the industry standard for structured data) will play alongside Google Base structured data. Right now it seems like Google is going its own route, so where does that leave microformats?

The service is in private beta, but readers here who request accounts and include the letters RWW in their entries to the request form will be given accounts promptly.

The feed discovery process is very nice; Onaswarm lets you enter various usernames you use on different sites, then searches for RSS feeds based on those usernames. I like it.

Item display is a bit unorthodox but I think I like it. The most recent time that a certain feed updated is displayed, followed by other updates from that same feed from earlier in the day, followed by the second most recent feed to have updated. It's hard to explain and it wasn't completely clear to me, but after asking for clarification it makes sense.

You can view all of someone's updates or just "front page" level, or high priority, updates. That's a nice touch.

Adding friends should give you an opportunity to send them a message, but it doesn't.

OpenID login is supported, the calendaring is microformats-based and the note writing process is good. I'd like to get the geeks in Portland, Oregon to join the Portland Swarm so we can keep track of each other's blog posts, tweets, tags and events. Swarm members have group posting privileges, a common calendar and item aggregation.

Onaswarm is a potentially powerful tool. It's like a gestural feed reader for groups. If usability and aesthetics can improve just enough, then this one could become a valued service for many groups of people online.

- Google bullish on Atom, Microsoft bullish on RSS? (Robert Scoble links to my thread about Google's Atom bullishness. Robert: "our RSS platform is reading in Atom too and we’ll support whatever the community adopts.")

- It's Giant Webpages in the Sky‚Ñ¢ (Best. Startup. Name. Ever -- it's a billboard tech company)

- Ben Barren hearts hListings (as do I -- Ben: "We'll be definitely deploying some of this krunk downunder.")

- Microsoft Outlines Its Windows Live Developer Strategy ("In Microsoft's world view, developers can build their own 'Windows Live experiences'")

- Web 2.0 Boom (from one of my fave new blogs, called A Startup Tale - Sprenzy: "Tomorrow is my last day of work for the "man". Then the real work begins.")

- New Tim Berners-Lee interview (security, mobile web and Web Services the three big issues of the Web, according to TBL)

- Jeremy Zawodny disappointed by Valleywag wit (tells Nick Douglas he must do better... hmm, snark baiting is a dangerous business)

Photo: Dave Winer

...microchunking your content, taking advantage of open standards, employing microformats, letting users subscribe to all kinds of RSS feeds, freeing your content via APIs and other means, designing for re-use of information, monetizing it, and more.

Of those things, RSS, XHTML, APIs and microformats are key building blocks.

In the comments to my first post, several people noted that microformats and Structured Blogging are too hard for normal people to use - and that is true currently. But the goal of Structured Blogging is to provide easy-to-use tools for using microformats. Currently there are just two plugins available that achieve this (for Wordpress and Movable Type), but over time there will be more mainstream tools released - such as integration with hosted blog platforms like Typepad and 'instant blogging' web forms such as what edgeio recently introduced. Also some browsers are integrating microformats into their product.

Another concern raised was about the number of microformats that will be released - will a proliferation of microformats hamper uptake? For this I have to defer to Marc Canter, who went as far as to create a 'law' to address this. He calls it Canter's Law #1 and it basically says: support all formats and don't take sides, because the user doesn't care about your geeky format wars. As Marc put it :

"No human cares about what format is supported. Only us. Flickr proved that they could be completely format agnostic and provide a compelling experience to all."

Fred Simmons pointed out in his comment that we need structured microcontent in order to better filter and find the quality microcontent - and keep spam at bay. This to me has always been the corollary of microcontent: having good filters to sort it. It's why I declared 2006 to be The Year of the Filter. Currently tools like Memeorandum, Topix, TailRank, Rojo and Findory are doing a good job of tackling this issue.

Thomas Bate left a long comment, noting:

"This discussion needs to extend a bit further to include REALLY structured blogging via enclosures containing not just audio and video, but images, maps and detailed tabular structured data as well. [...] REAL business involves VERY structured data with no room for ambiguity...detailed product specifications, prices, serial numbers for instruction manuals, etc."

It's an intriguing analysis from Thomas, because he says that "Container design is far from dead, but it HAS moved away from the server-side web page as container." So in Thomas' view, although content has been freed from its website container - there are new containers to take its place in the form of "portable web feed enclosures". He calls it 'datacasting'. Interesting point and I will explore that some more...

Software developer Joel Hoard at Browserless Web wrote an interesting post in response to mine. I especially liked this point:

"My primary problem with structured blogging is that it’s a very powerful concept that doesn’t provide a lot of immediate value to individual bloggers. It’s what in VC terms is a “vitamin product” (as opposed to a “painkiller”) in that while it’s very beneficial, it doesn’t solve an immediate need."

That's so true and is one of the big challenges of the Structured Blogging initiative - to show users where the value is.

Sean McGrath, CTO of Propylon, wrote:

"The future of structured content in my opinion is content tunnelled inside human readable content. *Not* machine readable content that can be converted/published for human readability."

Sean thinks ODF and XHTML will play a big part in this new microcontent world and he has a theory about "Hi XML and Lo XML", which developers should read.

Finally we get to Ryan King's post. Despite the inflammatory title ("Richard MacManus gets microformats wrong"), what it boils down to is that Ryan thinks HTML is more important in the grand scheme of things than XML and its dialects. Said Ryan:

"XML has come no where near matching HTML in terms of distribution and interoperability."

Well firstly I don't see the point of an XML vs HTML us-vs-them conversation - that's format wars and I'm not interested in those. The Structured Blogging initiative actually spits out microformats in both HTML and XML (RSS etc) formats. Plus XML itself has wormed its way into HTML, via XHTML, so the two (xml and html) complement each other well.

Secondly I’m not saying HTML still isn’t really important, perhaps still moreso than XML. However I do think the future of data formats on the Web is XML and its dialects - especially RSS/Atom. As a delivery method, RSS has already proven itself and it will continue to be extended into a more general purpose content format on the Web - look at the developments around Atom for example, or at the things Microsoft is doing with RSS.

OK, that wraps up the responses to my first article. Next up: Microcontent Design in action at the BBC.

Photo: Dion Hinchcliffe (of Marc Canter and the microformats BoF at MIX 06)

"The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let's call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together - RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats."

I agree that Google Reader has been adding some fantastic functionality over recent months. Indeed I now use Google Reader as my main RSS Reader - just last week I loaded it up with a bunch more OPML files and RSS feeds. Also by reading the official Google Reader blog, you can tell the engineers are passionate about building up and adding new things to the product - something sadly missing in other top online RSS Readers, some of which have stayed largely the same for 2+ years now.

It remains to be seen whether Google Reader will add more 'writer' features over 2007 - Google has to be careful the product doesn't become too geeky and experimental. You can quickly scare off people with talk of OPML and microformats (guilty!). But I think Google Reader is the most interesting online RSS Reader around right now, so if they can integrate the 'writer' functionalities into the product in a way that they're very easy to use... the RSS reading market could come alive again.

The SearchMonkey platform has three main components, according to Yahoo!:

• "Site owners share structured data with Yahoo!, using semantic markup (microformats, RDF), standardized XML feeds, APIs (OpenSearch or other web services), and page extraction.
• Third party developers build SearchMonkey applications.
• Consumers customize their search experience."

SearchMonkey applications come in two flavors: Enhanced Results and Infobars -- though both theoretically enhance search results. Apps are triggered when organic search results include a specific URL. Enhanced results replace a normal search result and must include information only from the site referred to in the actual result. Infobars, which appear directly below results, can include links to other resources or calls for user action.

For example, if you owned a Lebron James fan site, you could create an Enhanced Result that replaced instances of results from your site with a box showing James' latest stats and news articles pulled from structured data on your site.

Yahoo! Developer Network today released a quick guide to adding Microformats to your site. Indexing Microformats, and then further sweetening the pot by allowing developers to create applications that use that structured data and enhance the actual search results, should help push the use of semantic markup across the web. Besides potentially creating a better user experience via search results widgets, by incentivizing the use of semantic markup Yahoo!'s new open developer platform will help get us to a world where the bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web is feasible.

Yahoo! is also hosting a SearchMonkey Developer Challenge with $10,000 in prizes going to winners in 4 categories: Best Enhanced Result, Best Infobar, Most Innovative Use of Structured Data, Best Data Service, and Grand Prize (best over all categories).

Combined with microformats that will structure signification of identity and social connections, the new structure of the site could enable any number of interesting mashup possibilities.

The New Look, Under the Covers

XFN and hCard have been added to Digg to communicate names, nicknames, identities in photos and friends lists. You can see what this looks like by going to any Digg item page, viewing the source code and searching for the word "property." Speaking of property, you'll notice that attribution for each page is now also marked up formally: content submitted to Digg is attributed to the public domain by "Digg users."

All of this might seem mundane but thinking just a few steps ahead lets us imagine any number of possibilities. My favorite? Friends network (XFN) plus Attention Profiles (Digging histories via the already supported APML) combined to offer high quality recommendations on any site that wants to pull in the data and process it. Remember, though - if you want to use your Digg history for anything elsewhere then you've got to turn on your APML profiling via that obscure little green button next to the "most dugg in last 30 days" section on your profile.

Hold on a Second, What About...

As much fun as that all sounds, and as much as we like Digg - there's a couple of issues here. APML is a big part of the juice behind the social graph that's being exposed but Digg isn't doing a very good job with that format. Users have to turn it on and it hardly exposes anything (here's mine for download, for example.) Here's me, here's my friends and here's what we all like: why offer a half-hearted description of the last part, what we all like?

Second, has Digg just given up on OpenID? The company made a high profile announcement more than a year ago saying that they would support it. Then everyone waited until OpenID 2.0 came out. It's been out now, and now OpenID support.

Finally, what about Mixx's read/write API that lets users read, submit and comment from 3rd party sites? What about Sk*rt's bookmarklet to let users post things from offsite? Is Digg putting some slivers of standards-based markup on their site and expecting everyone to be thankful for it? I know I'd like to see more.

Digg's a great site and it's terrific that they are publicly announcing their move to include semantic markup for search engines and microformats for mashup developers. The depth of the data portability moves just seem disproportionate with the size of the community, the roll the company has played in the web 2.0 economy and the potential for really extensive innovation.

"...content will be more important than its container in this next phase.

That's a big shift for old media to come to grips with. Killer apps, such as search, RSS and video-capture software such as Tivo -- to name just a few -- have begun to unlock content from any vessel we try to put it in.

Who needs to bookmark and surf a bunch of Web sites anymore, when you can search or monitor several RSS "feeds" much more efficiently?"

When Associated Press CEO Tom Curley spoke those words in a November 2004 keynote speech to the Online News Association Conference, he also struck at the heart of a paradigm shift in web design - from designing for the page to designing for microcontent. Put another way: when a Web ‘site’, or 'container' to use Curley's lexicon, is no longer necessarily how users will experience your content – what does that mean for web designers? It essentially means taking a microcontent view of design. 

Photo: venegas

As I’ll outline in this series, microcontent design involves: microchunking your content, taking advantage of open standards, employing microformats, letting users subscribe to all kinds of RSS feeds, freeing your content via APIs and other means, designing for re-use of information, monetizing it, and more.

Data sources and formats

"The Semantic Web is just the application of weblike design to data; it will be many more decades before we will be able to say we have really implemented the Web idea in the full, if ever we can."
Tim Berners-Lee, October 2004

While Sir Tim Berners-Lee was referring to the grand notion of the Semantic Web in the above quote, in many ways his vision of applying “weblike design to data” is already being implemented in the form of technologies like RSS, APIs, XML.

XML has largely lived up to its promise of being the data format of choice for the Web 2.0 era. And by far the most widely deployed format is RSS 2.0, which is a loosely structured XML dialect. Sir Tim Berners-Lee would probably prefer that RDF, a much more rigorously structured form of XML, were used instead. But that’s another story! 

Microsoft bullish for RSS, Google for Atom

Microsoft and Yahoo are two big Internet companies putting their weight behind RSS 2.0, as I've documented at length over the last couple of years. But there are also a lot of advocates for Atom, an alternative RSS format that is said to be more extensible. Indeed at the Microsoft Mix '06 event yesterday, Google employee Patrick Chanezon (an Adwords evangelist) said in an interview that Google is "very bullish" on Atom. Patrick said:

"Instead of taking Atom as the rich content model for feeds at the implementation layer, you [Microsoft] took RSS 2.0 - which obliges you to do all kind of translations.  [...] I really think this [Atom] is the future of syndication. At Google we're very bullish for Atom. [...] As Gates said in his speech, feeds usage will skyrocket in the next few years - but Atom is a much more solid format for that kind of growth."

The Microsoft interviewer retorted that RSS has the same "good enough" attribute that drove the adoption of MP3.

Pic: kathy kawasaki

Either way you look at it, RSS (including Atom) and XML are the de-facto formats for data in the Web 2.0 world. If you release your data in those formats, that’s step one in the data design process.

Representing data and designing for re-use of information

Step two is standard ways of representing data, to enable people (and machines) to find and consume it. In an era where a veritable glut of media is available online, from both professional and amateur content sources, it’s become very important to make sure your data is easy to find and use.

Structured Blogging and microformats are two relatively geeky topics at this point in their evolution, but they are significant developments in terms of representing data.

Structured Blogging

Structured Blogging is an initiative launched in December 2005 by small RSS-driven companies PubSub and Broadband Mechanics (disclaimer: I work for the latter). Structured Blogging is a set of formats and plugins that enable blogs to publish different kinds of information - like events, reviews and classified ads - in a 'structured' format, so that aggregators can pick up the data from all over the Web.

It’s that ‘re-use’ of blog content via aggregation that will be where the real value lies in Structured Blogging. As of writing there are no Structured Blogging aggregators available, but a hint at the value that it could provide in future is the independent company edgeio – which was launched in February 2006. Sellers can get their data listed on edgeio’s website, simply by posting an item to sell on their own weblog and tagging it “listings”. Buyers are able to search and find goods and services at the edgeio website. How it works is that edgeio aggregates goods and services data by scanning over 25 million RSS feeds, looking for the tag "listings".

This is a great example of how data you publish on your own weblog, or at a specialist service such as the jobs listing site SimplyHired.com, can be ‘re-used’ by a service like edgeio – simply because of the way the data is marked up. Whether you use Structured Blogging markup, or simple tagging that edgeio will recognize and pick up, either way you are in a very real sense designing your microcontent for re-use.

Microformats

Microformats is the generic name given to any format that builds on XML (X)HTML to provide additional metadata about web objects. This is the definition on the microformats.org website:

"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards."

A good example of a microformat is hReview, a format that provides a common markup for reviews (of products, services, etc). Check out Phil Pearson's NZ Coffee Review site for an example of hReview in action. Also it's great to see Microsoft embracing microformats, as announced at Mix '06.

It’s important to note that microformats and the Structured Blogging initiative are both open standards and complement one another. The Structured Blogging toolset outputs reviews in the hReview format, for example. So essentially Structured Blogging provides tools to publish structured content, which formats it nicely for users and marks it up with microformats.

To be continued...

Update: microformats actually build on (X)HTML, not XML as I originally wrote in the first sentence of the last section. Thanks Ryan King for correcting me and Phil Pearson for confirming it.