Hi, I'm new on the list, so apologies if this was already discussed - I couldn't find any mention of something like this on the Web.
I'd like to suggest a way to make microformatted content easily discoverable to search engine queries. It's a pretty minor and not very elegant as design goes, but I think it might help a bit to psuh microformats closer towards a Semantic Web. The idea is simply to have a standard text that can be added to a Web page containing mf-ed content. For example, "mf_hReview". Since the text exists outside of tags, it is indexed by existing search engines, and thus a Google search for "mf_hReview Dylan Highway 61" would yield reviews of that album. (Obviously there will be texts for hCalendar/hCard etc, facilitating searches for "mf_hCalendar barCamp", for example) While the immediate benefit will be the above Google searches, the later - and bigger - one may come from sites that will provide a tailored front end for data on a specific domain: restaurant reviews, music events etc. Perhaps it's similar to what Edgeio does, but leaving the content aggregation part to existing search engines, and removing the pinging process altogether. The key here is the text itself being a single agreed standard. Using CSS it can be made invisible to users but indexable for search engines. I realize this is pretty kludgy, but I believe at least some publishers will pick it up it to make their data more accessible, and in the longer view it might even help spread the use of Microformats in itself. I wrote about it a bit also here: http://niryariv.wordpress.com/2007/01/18/searchable-microformats/ I hope this all makes sense. Would love to hear your comments :) - Nir _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
