Green Ruby Programmer: Technorati Weblog: Introducing Microformats Search and Pingerati

Technorati announced some pretty exciting developments on their weblog just over a week ago, on May 31.

The big news is that they have added support for Microformats. Microformats included metadata about the information contained in a document, or entry in a document, directly into the internals of the document itself.

While obviously, this further mixes content with presentation to a certain degree, it is sort of a special case. The information itself, is generally not so much data as metadata. It describes the content, it is not the content per se. Further, what it really does is provide context about that content.

It is knowledge of that context that Technorati, the popular blog indexing/searching/tagging service, has now been enabled to read and exploit for the benefit of its readers. That in turn, will be a big help to the authors of the blogs it harnesses.

This assumes their goal is to either become popular, which being helpful to a readership certainly does - or if they just want to be able to organize their own writing for their own use.

After all, many weblogs are simply journals in the diary sense, not in the publications sense.

Speaking of context, this is taking place in front of the backdrop of the development of Firefox 2.0. That version, expected out later this year, will introduce a feature called Microsummaries.

Microsummaries will scrape the content and or anything else in the page, including information in Microformats, and display it in a consolidated presentation in the browser. This will save browser users from a lot of hunting around and possibly even math or sorting effort. Other uses will probably arise too.

Technorati Weblog:

This afternoon Technorati introduces a technology preview of microformats search for contacts, events, and reviews. Available now in the Technorati Kitchen, I invite you to come take a look at this first of a kind realtime microformats search engine, see what the team has worked very hard to build for you, and let us know what you think and what you want from microformats search.

If you are (or will be) publishing with microformats in your blog, and you're already pinging Technorati, then you are all set. Our new microformats search will index your microformats.