Microformat Publishing / Structured Blogging: the 'Bottom-Up' Semantic Web

Charlene Li and John Battelle talk about structured blogging.  Seems like the microformat publishing topic (aka decentralized tagging) is popping up all over the place.  While most of the discussion has been theoretical to date, the applications in vertical search are likely to be fairly practical and rather useful. 

For more on this subject, check out the Vertical Leap conference panels on Blog & News Search and Emerging Technology in Vertical Search.  Technorati, Feedster, PubSub, other usual suspects will be speaking.

btw, don't know if Battelle officially coined it, but i like the term bottom-up semantic web.

Comments

[Bud Gibson]

I think we have more than theory here. Look at the technorati results all of which derive from the reltag microformat. I give a summary here. The bottom line is that microformats are affecting search visibility now because they tie into existing web infrastructure.

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/06/folksonomy_make.html

[Dave McClure]

Apologies Bud, didn't mean to downplay the significance of the issue, however my comment was more noting the # of microformat data publishers, rather than # of indexers.

While I agree Technorati and others are already making use of the data available out there, the limited # of data publishers (currently) makes it a little less useful at the moment.

However, i'd certainly bet that as more people & publishers adopt the standard it will blossom. And in fact, we'd like to be a part of that revolution.

May a thousand microformats bloom... :)

- Dave McClure
www.simplyhired.com