Technorati has unveiled some new features in the Technorati Kitchen recently which adds microformat search to the mix. This means that you will soon be able to search contacts cards (hCards), events (hEvents) and reviews (hReviews) via Technorati. For more information on microformats you might want to check out microformats.org. Most simply put, microformats are:
"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards."
Technorati has also introduced Pingerati. According to are recent article by John Battelle, Pingerati is supposed to:
"…provide a channel to translate human-directed announcements into microformat-ready html."
Tantek Çelik, Technorati Chief Technologist, posted last week about the new features and said this of microformats:
"Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web."
I think this service will come in pretty handy in the future as more people adopt its usage. Just yesterday a colleague asked me if I knew of a way to search for someone’s contact information and the new microformat search for an hCard may been the solution we were looking for. This is making the assumption that the person we are looking for has placed their contact information online somewhere to be found by Technorati. Nonetheless, it is a step in the right direction.
Tags: microformats, search, pingerati, ping, liveweb, realtimeweb, hCard, hCalendar, hReview.
