Yelp: A Poster Child For Semantic Markup

Search Engine Land.com:
Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.
There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings [...]

hNews Might Not Be So Bad

The AP’s diagram of their Protect, Point, Pay “news DRM” scheme looked like a joke, then I saw the parody.
Despite all the smoke and hype, Ed Felton explains that it’s underwhelming, at most. Still, hNews might be an interesting format for some blogs to adopt. Most of what the AP is rattling their saber about [...]

Google Recommends Microformats and RDFa

Google’s own webmasters help site recommends microformats and RDFa structured data to improve indexing and usefulness of the data. Review metadata appears to have full support, while people, product, and business data are in beta.

OpenSearch Progress

I really need to keep better tabs on Michael Fagan, as his June 11 OpenSearch Update is full of goodies.
OpenSearch, OpenSearch referrer extension, extensions, microformats, search suggestions

IdM Takes Lessons From the Microformats Crowd

A tip from Ryan sent me looking at MicroID:

a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere.

The idea is to hash a user’s email address (or other identifier) with the name of the site it will be published on, giving a string that can be inserted — in true Microformats style — as an element of the html on the site.

Microformats

Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin).
What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory:
When writing markup [...]