(2005-07-25) Marks Understanding True Decentralisation The Microformat Model

Kevin Marks: Understanding: true decentralization - the microformat model. ...the tagspace linked to (which provides the context for the meaning of the tag), with the services that can index the tag. These are completely independent. You can link to Technorati Tags, your own site, Wikipedia or anyone who provides a tagspace with a URL that ends in the tag you want

Similarly, anyone can index the tags provided this way. They are open and loosely coupled. Technorati indexes all links with rel="tag" on as tags, independent of which site they link to. We designed the spec that way from day one to avoid lock-in, and encourage adoption

Owning your own data is the key point.

The microformats model is to encode common data formats in XHTML so you can put the data on your own blog, and multiple tools can take advantage of it.

Lets look at the example of tagging restaurant reviews that both Jeff and Stowe mention. The microformat way to do this is to use hReview, an open standard for publishing reviews

Technorati and other comprehensive blog indexers will pick up the 'seafood','fish', 'outside' and 'Moss Landing' tags from that and associate them with this post, but a specialised service looking for reviews could see them in the context of the 'hreview' class, and use the more structured rating data to make more sense of it.