One of the big issues of Web 2.0 is the computers inability to distinguish what the content is. You might well have “Author: Simon Day” which, to a human, is very obvious but to a search engine spider or computer it isn’t because the page can contain many names. It simply cannot extrapolate the information as well as a human because the pages can contain many other names, dates, times, URL’s, email addresses and so on . What we’ve needed for a long time is a way for the spiders and computers to know what is actually happening on a section of a page and give it precise details like, as an example, the when, the what and the who.
Microformats are a way of adding a small piece of markup so it can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined. Continue reading
