Microformats are old news to attentive TeleBlog readers, and now they could be about to take off in a big way, with encouragement from Yahoo—not just the developers of Firefox and Internet Explorer, both of which already have committed to supporting them.
In a nutshell, Yahoo will be able to extract information in context from a suitably coded Web page—and then reposition it for more precise and flexible search results, in keeping with the philosophy behind the semantic Web.
Microformats as traffic boosters
TeleBlog regular Branko Collin gave a nice explanation of how microformats could aid pickups of information from book reviews for Technorati. Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation, whom I met Friday at a library conference in NYC, has also been a big booster of the concept. I can see why. As described by Wikipedia, “any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.”
That sounds anti-commerce. But actually microformats could help even commercial sites by, say, bringing more traffic to a book review magazine than it would receive otherwise. Theoretically Yahoo could create a page listing reviews for a certain book and automatically pick up ratings from each publication’s writeup. Such a capability, in turn, might just drive you to visit the sites and see how the reviewers justified the rating. What’s more, other sites could ride Yahoo’s coattails and reproduce the Yahoo page.
Enticing shoppers
Imagine other possibilities. What about a cookbook publisher that could use microformats to ease distribution of sample recipes—to entice shoppers to check out the actual book? In fact, over at the PersonaNonData blog, Michael Cairns (photo), former president of Bowker, gives examples of how microformats could help publishers of cookbooks and others. Granted, some publishers may fret over loss of control over content, or of the public domain requirements, but the more forward-looking publishers will embrace the microformat concept as a way to weave themselves more tightly into the fabric of the Web. Needless to say, they could use microformats to promote paper books, not just E versions of the same titles.
Related: Technocrunch’s latest microformat-related post (from which I’ve picked up the image). Also see Microformats.org.
We already use DublinCore in the page of our books and rel-tag on UGC for Feedbooks.
We’ll be expanding our community oriented features in the upcoming months: for example reviews will be hReview (microformat for reviews) compliant.
One of the main issue with such semantic data will be: who can acces to these data sets and how ? Improving your SEO is nice, but the ability to automatically discover external reviews for a given book would be MUCH nicer. We’ll need someone to centralize such data and I sincerely hope that these data crawlers will be open and reliable enough.