It’s entirely possible I’m being dense or unimaginative, which is why I’m writing this on my blog. I’ve been looking into the new Microformat initiatives along with the Structured Blogging implementations and I’m coming up with a big fat, “Wuh?” It’s hard to dismiss it with companies like Technorati and Yahoo behind it, so I want to get it, but I keep drawing up a blank.

I understand the vision of the thing. By using a Structured Blogging plugin or otherwise embedding a Microformat in your blog posts, you can make it easier for search engines and other services find and index your post. For example, say you published a movie review of Cars and you had a rating you gave the movie. Normally, it would be hard for a search engine to extract the rating you gave the movie. If your post was formatted using the hReview microformat, though, search engines would be able to just grab the rating information out.

I get all of that, and still I don’t want to use this stuff on FatMixx. First of all, in what I just described, there’s no mention of why I want to do this. Obviously, one benefit to the blogger is that they can get more traffic if posts are easier to index and find. The microformats folks have other ideas, too.

In the end, though, this is a set of products created to help people create aggregation services, not the people that actually create posts. From a user standpoint, I don’t really want to have something dictate which fields I have to have in my post, or how my post should be structured (more on that in a second). There’s not much benefit to me, especially since I’m not posting that much structured content anyway. Ask yourself how many reviews you post in general. If you’re writing the next Engadget killer or whatever, maybe it makes sense for you. You’ll have a lot of reviews. For the political bloggers or the technology bloggers (the two biggest segments), though, what’s the benefit?

There’s a bigger problem, though. The latest round of microformats seem to dictate post formatting as much as they structure the data underlying the post. The structured blogging plugin, for example, outputs the underlying tags in the format they’ve chosen for the plugin. A data format is useless to me if it dictates the format of my posts. I could change the style, but the CSS gets tricky if I want to change the order of the metadata.

For example, in my movie reviews, I like to put the rating after the full review. I’d have to somehow flip the order via CSS or JS. I realize this is a nit, but it points at the underlying problem with microformats: presentation is impacted by the compound microformats which makes them less desirable to use.

This doesn’t impact the elemental microformats, which is why they’re both more popular as well as much easier to implement. I use both the XFN and Tags microformats here on FM.

I guess I could fix the plugin, though, by allowing users to configure the output order or whatever, but again, why? I keep going around in this circle between the two problems. I want to contribute to the growth of the semantic web, but I’d like to know why.

These formats seem like they’re created to solve a service provider’s problem and not a customer’s problem. What problem do I have that this will help?