One of the ways I use RSS most effectively is to subscribe to Technorati and Google searches, Technorati tag searches, and so on. In fact, I wrote a recent post elsewhere outlining how I feel “RSS” usage will change in the short to medium term, from being blog oriented to being task oriented (that is, rather than subscribing to specific blogs, I think increasingly we’ll subscribe to actions like keyword or tags searches).
What I have noticed in the last few days is an explosion of results, particularly using Google Blog Search (but also Technorati too, perhaps its Google catching up?) for “microformats”. Alex Faaborg’s articles on browser/microformats user experience issues (Alex is a user experience designer working on Firefox 3), Michael Kaply’s “Operator” extension for Firefox, and most recently Richard MacManus’s Read/Write Web article “Mozilla Does Microformats: Firefox 3 as Information Broker” (heavily Digged, linked to from all over) are all driving interest in microformats up a notch or two.
I’ve also noticed a number of the usual “predictions for 2007″ posts from all over predicting increased prominence for microformats this year.
I do know there will be a book on microformats out thorugh Apress/Friends of Ed, hopefully in late March (’cause I wrote it 
), so that can’t hurt either.
2007 - The year of microformats? We can only hope. And work hard to make it happen.
[tags]firefox, microformats[/tags]
{ 7 } Comments
I hope so. I think it would also be cool to see a search operator specifically for microformats.
Jon,
Try Technorati’s Microformats search, as well as the experimental, open sourced Alexa (crawl as opposed to ping based) hCard search engine.
john
Operator is what made me jump on board Microformats for our Porchlight product. Being able to extract data via hCard and hCalendar into my other applications was an excellent use case for the whole Microformats movement, and I look forward to being able to further implement them in the future.
Justin,
nice one. Have you posted any details of how you use microformats?
john
I hope that, in 2007, people will do more jobs using Microformats.
In 2007, I will be microformat enabling a directory of 700 faculty at a school in a major US private university.
John,
Blog post here:http://secondgearllc.com/blog/2007/01/porchlight-microformats/
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A microscope on Microformats…
Reading through my feeds, an article about how Microformats might be integrated into the next release of Firefox caught my eye today. If you remember, Microformats is present in the current latest sta……
[…] Since microformat are such an invisible, yet solid way of presenting little bits of shareable data, I think it has the potential to reach where feeds have today, since they technically present the same thing; a simple way of sharing data amongst applications. Practically any data can be turned into a microformat, as long as there is wide generation of it. With some touting the new year as one for Microformats, I am somewhat agreeing with them. It ‘could’ be the next big thing! I am going to begin to use it in places where I think they’re necessary. My little contribution in building a smarter, more semantic web! Seems fun and useful!
Install one of those extensions, and discover a new way to work with information for yourself! Posted under Internet on 14 January, 07. […]
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