To those in the digital world microformats are increasingly taking on the sort of significance that marbles, yoyo’s and micro-machines once had for kids in playgrounds across the country. And perhaps, in this hyper-connected digital age, they’re all the rage in playgrounds as well. Or perhaps not.
Whatever the case, they’re causing a bit of a stir and for those unsure what they are, the official microformats website defines them as:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging)

It’s essentially a way of adding semantic meaning to an HTML tag; an attribute in the form of a small piece of code which you can attach to an existing tag.

The reason microformats are getting people so hot under the collar, is that Google have started using them in their search results. This means that if, for example, you search for a product, Google is able to aggregate reviews made using the hReview microformat from across the interweb and then display that information in the search results. Google are calling this additional information a ‘Rich Snippet’.

Although tagging is nothing new, and is an integral part of how sites such as Flickr and Delicious work (using the ‘Rel’ attribute), the ability to be able to semantically (and relatively easily) explain to search engines a broad range of information is a significant step towards what Sir Tim Berners Lee (the inventor of the web… kind of) dreamt when he talked about the emergence of the ‘semantic web’:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

The ease with which people can now remove any ambiguity and explain to search engines in clear(ish) English exactly what the information on their website is about is likely to make the use of microformats much more widespread. People now have the opportunity to make information much more discoverable, as well as increase the click-through from search results as users are provided with much more relevant and useful information.

This means that when someone runs a search query such as a person’s name, or a particular location – search engines can quickly pull together a broad range of information that real people have decided is relevant to those search queries. The results returned could be photos, people’s acquaintances (through the XFN microformat), or perhaps news stories which are deemed relevant to the query. The benefit of microformats is that such standardisation makes data much easier to navigate and understand.

A consequence of being able to pull together relevant information from a range of disparate sources is that it leads to an overall decentralization of the web. This shift is reflected in Facebook’s recent move to support OpenID, a ‘free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the internet’. Facebook explain their reasoning behind adopting this as being rooted in the fact that:

The success of the web is rooted in the fundamental concept of decentralization. Even from a biological evolutionary standpoint, this is the principle which allows systems to become robust and thrive.

Whilst there is currently no evidence that using semantic markup has a direct influence on search engine rankings that’s not to say that it won’t have at some point in the not too distant future, as Google themselves have noted:

As structured data becomes more widespread on the web, we expect to find many new applications for it, and we’re excited about the possibilities.

It is likely that in the future we will see the importance of self organizing systems and AI increase as more and more content is harvested from crowds of un-trusted sources. What this could lead to is SEO involving having to put as much weight on optimising content with semantic markup / class-names and microformats as was initially put on the correct use of <h1><title> markup when Altavista and other large search engines started taking these things into account.

What this all really means is that finding stuff on the internet is going to become much easier. However it also might mean that Google is going to be one step closer to turning into Skynet. Thank goodness we all have Christian Bale to shout us to safety.

Micro Machines image by liz-photography on flickr

Rich snippet image from Google Webmaster Central Blog

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