Grokking microformats

I attended The Growth and Evolution of Microformats a few days ago at SXSW. I thought it was a great panel that suffered only from having too little time. The exit crowd seemed pretty excited about the panel as well, but it was clear that for every person attending to hear how microformats have evolved in the last year, there were 5 sitting in, hoping to figure the damn things out. So, what’s a microformat? Why do I care?

For those of you who already know, congratulations, you’re officially a geek. For those of you that play dodgeball at recess, here’s a really quick overview, followed, I hope, by a point.

Microformats are a set of principles that allow developers to explicitly define data types. So, by adding a few standardized tag attributes and classes, developers can define certain types of data, like a person’s contact info (hcard) or a calendar event (hcalendar.) Once this data is formatted, secondary processes can automatically handle and manipulate the data. A single click can import a colleague’s vcard or sync your calendar with panels you find interesting at an upcoming conference, for instance. [I've written more about microformats if you're interested.]

If the value in this isn’t jumping out at you like a Jack Russel Terrier, it might be because it seems so basic. Why wouldn’t you be able to extract a company’s contact information from their site with a single click? The reason is simple: machines can’t read, or at least, they can’t comprehend. Microformats add machine-readable context, making an otherwise impossible task (auto-extracting and importing meaningful information from any site) extremely simple.

And while auto-importing a single contact may not sound like a profound benefit, think about groups of contacts, or a series of calendar events. Auto-imported, auto-organized. Consumers can pull information quicker than ever, publishers can push it quicker and more effectively than ever. And I’m not even getting into the value of [microformat-enabled] vertical search.

The first step to making this useful for all is to format the data. If you’re a developer or publisher looking to learn more, there are a number of resources available to you including the microformats site. I’d recommend grabbing the Tails extension for Firefox as well. Tails alerts you to available microformat data on a page and allows you to view and act on them with a single click (import contact info or events, bookmark blog post, map with Google, etc.) There are other microformat readers available as well, but Tails is what I use.

So, here’s my point: the microformats concept is huge. It’s painfully simple. It’s incredibly useful to anyone. And it’s all but ignored outside of the Web 2.0 rabbit hole.

I’d love to hear if anyone reading is implementing them.