Technorati Do Microformats, Pingerati

Just stumbled onto an announcment on the Technorati blog announcing two new services. Tantek Çelik writes:

I’m very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem. Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web.

Microformats enable any site to easily publish common data types such as tags, licenses, contacts, events, reviews, listings, etc. on any page on the Web, with only minor edits to their HTML. For me personally, this has meant enabling millions of people to take control of their own data, publish and update it wherever they want, whenever they want, and move it freely among services, without having it locked up behind a walled garden or trapped in a “roach motel”.

Read more about Microformats Search and Pingerati on the Technorati blog. Read a simple overview of what microformats are here and here.

This is all completely new to me but if I’m getting the basics correctly (and for tonight, I just skimmed) it looks like one of those things that initially seems complicated and quickly simplifies everything else once you grasp it. Like RSS, CSS, Tags, etc. I think it’s something I’ll really like when I dig in a bit. A quote from the Microformats.org wiki sums it up pretty well:

Microformats make it easy for you or anyone to share and reuse data in your webpages and content elsewhere — for example, to populate an address book, browse social relationships, share reviews, tag content or publish and discover events.

Now, if this means I could publish my email address and keep it away from spambots, I’m in. But since it says elsewhere that the formats are both human and machine readable, I’m guessing it will not solve that problem (darn it). But it might be the answer to a question I got last week from Marcy at Root Magazine. She saw a beta version of ExtCalendar and wanted to be able to embed a searchable events calendar in her TypePad blog. Microformats kinda look like a way to do that.

When I get a chance to explore more fully, I’ll report in better depth. It appears that this is a big week (day, even) for launches, and of course I can’t try everything at once.

I did find one other really cool thing in Tantek’s post that I didn’t know about… Technorati Kitchen. This is th ebeta lab for new stuff from Technorati that’s ready for testing but not for release. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that.