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Great summary, David. Pingerati as a Pushmepullyou? We do need a new metaphor for coupling services via REST - 'unix pipes for the web' doesn't really get outside the geeks heads.

Nice pitch. Micro-formats will be making an ever bigger difference. Interesting to see the RDF folks develop a generic (and easy!) way to design and embedded micro-formats within HTML without centralised control (called RDFa). There is an interesting convergence going on here between islands of micro-formats and the emcompassing sea of semantic possibilities. (check out rdfa.info)

I'd be publishing stuff in microformats today if the tools available for output via my blogs weren't such a PITA. Now that there's aggregation, maybe more & better plugins will become available. I don't expect any microformat action on the 70-80 restaurant listings on h2otown.info soon, simply because I don't know if I'll be able to get access to that stuff for Drupal.

One thing about the restaurant guide is that the comments are very important. Will restaurant review microformats have some way of syndicating comments, and if so, how?

I may be a simple reactionary, but I have resisted microformat reviews because of an unwillingness to classify a book as a "product" and an art gallery opening as an "event." While generically every review may be simply a report with common elements, the prose drives the value, not the format; and I see these microformats as constraints rather than enablers. If I were writing catalogs and want-ads my opinion would be different.

Also what Lisa said about the PITA... not just for falafels anymore.

FP, the granularity of microformats is an interesting question. E.g., do we need special review format for books as opposed to movies? I don't know. My guess is that if there's a need, then the separate mf's will be created and will be relatively easily mapped by apps that want to lump the two types of reviews.

Or we could have one single microformat for all conceivable content...and we'd call it a "blog" :)

(First, makes the "metadata crackpot grimace", and then backs away from the keyboard...then comes back)

Technorati is doing neat stuff with the various things appearing under the microformats label.

Given your disclosure, what do you mean when you say "Microformats are... standards"?

I just wonder: what, in your opinion, makes these things something we should treat as standards?

(Disclosure: I think lots of different people should create lots of different things like this, but none of them should claim to be standards unless they go through a formal and recognized standards process.)

Retraction: I don't know why I grimaced--you actually really clearly differentiated the roles of data vs metadata in this context. Sorry about that--guess I need to stop working now... it's been a long day.

Jay, no need to retract nothing. You raise a good point. When I call them "standards" I don't mean that they're de facto or de jure standards. Simply calling something a standard doesn't establish it as a standard. I meant "standard" in the sense that they are intended to be used as standards. Microformats have met with limited success as standards.

I certainly disagree that standards always have to go through a "formal and recognized standards process" to be established as standards.

As for the relationship of microformats to Technorati: Technorati has been one of the players pushing for microformats, and Tantek has been a leader in the push, but Technorati hasn't been the only pusher and exercises no control over microformats. AFAIK.

To me, the one big thing for microformats is events. I have no idea why I can't syndicate everything I'm putting on the calendar for H2otown to, say, Upcoming.org.

Thanks David.

Part of my confusion is that the microformats marketing (e.g., parts of your post?) sometimes suggests these things are standards, while a number of the technical docs suggest that these formats are only draft specs that will be submitted to one or other recognized standards body.

I guess in the "whose Internet is it, anyway" category, this distinction matters--at least to a few people, at this point. But, I mean this only to suggest that there's some danger in allowing any body to declare something as a standard on the Internet.

In particular, I worry about how marketing effects perceptions about what is or isn't a standard, i.e., using market power to push adoption, as they say in the software biz.

Also, I see your point, e.g., the Microsoft DOC file format is a "standard" even though it's not a standard recognized by a standards body.

Thank you for the interesting debate. On our site, www.hitflip.de, we have a number of data pieces which we could conceivably publish either using an existing microformat (e.g. hReview) or with a new one (think hMediaItem, regarding David Weinberger's comment on whether we need hBook and hMovie or not).

While I'm pushing for this in our organization, its a bit hard to argument, especially compared to building an api returning straight xml. Right now, in a business setting, I don't see a compelling reason to publish things as microformats. Or am I missing something?