Blog on the Side

Find Contacts, Events, or Reviews with Technorati's Microformat Search

Try out Technorati's new microformats beta search engine to search contact information, events or reviews of movies and books that are posted to a web site or blog and marked up with microformats tags.

Do a search for Merlin Mann of 43 Folders and check out his Flickr entry on the result list.

Microformats are "a set of simple open data formats" that you can read and computers can also read and extract informaton from the microformat encoded information. Search engines know "this is a review" or "this is an event", etc. More and more tools are supporting microformat creation to spare you the time and effort of hand coding.

Microformats just received a big boost with the announcement that Yahoo! Local will support microformats: hCalendar, hCard, and hReview. Yahoo! has been an early adopter of microformats. "Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter."

There are some neat tools being rolled out that let you detect and add events marked up in hcalendar to your Yahoo or Outlook calendars. Take a look at Talis Export, a Firefox Extension that provides a status bar that lights up on pages with microformats and allows you to export hcard or hcalendar entries.

To do a quick test drive, try out Tantek Çelik hCard Creator.

Here's my hcard:



Tags: microformats | firefox extension