Blank (Media) Slate

If we’re all moving toward a more connected set of tools for communication with hopes of a better Web 3.0, how’re we gonna’ get there? Getting everyone to agree on a single standard seems like a pipedream, but what can we do in the meantime? From what I can tell, it seems relatively easy to chat up the concept of Microformats.

I bumped into this post from Tom Johnson which seemed to sum it up well:

The idea of microformats and the semantic web sound cool. And I’m looking forward to the day when microformats are widely adopted. But if microformats are so useful, why hasn’t Google come out with a microformats search yet? Why aren’t microformats being baked into the core structure of WordPress and other blogging platforms?

Not many people are using the structured blogging plugins, and those that do use it mainly to autoformat their posts. I even heard in a recent interview with Matt Mullenweg, the WordPress lead, that there are no current plans to develop structured blogging microformats into the WordPress code.

Oddly enough, Jason Kolb made a similar comment in a recent post:

The only technology that would really be necessary to make this work is to embed microformats in site text itself. I’m really not sure why this hasn’t taken off yet, it seems like a no-brainer to me. What I’m talking about, and I’ve actually posted some working examples of this before, is to surround chunks of text from a weblog post or text published to a public site with microformat markup so that it can be extracted as meaningful data.

It seems like a simple enough first step toward the semantic web thing. Like these two cats, I’m relatively surprised microformatting hasn’t been embraced, but I do believe the value chain still seems to be missing a couple links. There probably need to be a couple of successes (like a popular microformat tagging/retrieval tool) before the masses jump on board.

For my part in this digital village, I’m going to actively explore more microformatting opportunities. More if it develops.