Quit Your Day Job

There was a stage a while back when I discovered a book on Microformats, actually it was the definitive book on Microformats. Normally technical books put me into a ‘I wonder what superpower it would be the coolest to have’ mode every time. My mind just wanders a couple of pages in on a regular basis, but with this Microformats book it was slightly different.

It wasn’t that it was particularly well written or engaging, it was the content that was connecting with me. A better way of doing metadata. A way of making metadata meaningful in a human way rather than a disconnected list of keywords that on their own may not mean that much to the casual viewer.

It intrigued me as I’ve never been a particular fan of metadata, especially key words, subjects and descriptions because I can’t logically separate why this isn’t drawn from the content, especially the keywords, possibly the subject and probably not the description but then I imagined well written content would speak for itself in the first paragraph. Of course I don’t always practice this myself hence the wonder of the headspace plugin.

When I spoke to some people about Microformats they were quite dismissive of it and I buried my interest and enthusiasm as ignorance and carried on my way.

Now I recently read over at disassociated.com (well they link to an article about it) that Microformats may indeed be part of the next generation of search engine that Yahoo is currently moving forward - searchmonkey.

Apparently it will allow webmasters to have a little more control over how their links will appear within the search results with information that adds more meaning to a link:

So I might just go back and take a second look at Microformats and at the very least it has given me the urge to play around with Google’s subscribed links and update my sitemap.

Popularity: 15% [?]

More posts like this:

• That’s it MyBlogLog