Thanks to Chris Messina for single-handedly badgering sections of the industry to adopt microformats. Besides his recent open letter to Google about integrating microformats into the next version of blogger, he has also been pressing for LinkedIn, the business focused social network, to add support for microformats.
Well it seems it has worked and a couple of days ago, LinkedIn announced that they would be supporting two established microformats.
Chris, I’m working on hResume for our profile pages, but I didn’t finish in time for this release (though I did start with basic hCard support on the Connections page).
So looking at my own LinkedIn account, I was pleased to find that all of my connections were now available as hcard microformats.
Right now microformats have a limited appeal but as I have mentioned in the past, once Microsoft release Live Clipboard and people start to integrate it into their sites, it will make moving semantic data between applications and across the web much easier.
In fact recently it seems, discussions about microformats have been getting quiet popular, at a number of UK geek events. For example, at the first BarCampevent in the UK, local Microformateers – Glenn Jones, Frances Berriman and Drew Mclellan discussed microformats and explained how they are being used on the d.Construct backnetwork.
On the subject of microformats, two of my favourite websites this year have been World Cup KickOff and Geek In the Park, both extensively use microformats and both are beautifully structured if you view the source code. [I cannot believe I now find code sexy!]
If you would like to integrate microformats into your project or blog have a look at bloghelper which descibes some of the methods for WordPress and also has links to the microformat code creators.
In term sof practise what you preach, I am implementing the WordPress plugins this week and hopefully will ensure that all the events and reviews here on TechCrunch are discoverable as microformats.