After leaving the Blogging Showdown, I swung by Eric Meyer’s Emergent Semantics panel. This was basically Eric going through a bunch of microformats for the audience. (this panel room was also packed/overflowing)

Now I have nothing against microformats (and I rather like finding uses for the rel attribute), and I can see the arguments about lowercase ‘s’ semweb, but it just seems done before (I seem to recall some panels last year or the year before 🙂 especially in light of the new developments of lowercase ‘s’ in free tagging (aka emergent taxonomy aka folksonomies).

Probably the biggest reason I’m not hot over these microformats are that they are largely useless. Currently Google supports nofollow (although I’m sure all other search engines will follow [yeah, that’s a bad pun[one – ooh, I just can’t stop]]), and Technorati seems to be the only ones supporting/pushing most of the rest. Basically, while there’s little barrier to entry, as Alex pointed out in a conversation, there’s even less (none) upside. Also, what I think is even more critical, there are no applications (as in uses) that aren’t dependent on 3rd party tools. (To see what I mean, compare this to RSS — sure it’s great for 3rd party-aggregators [Pubsub, Feedster, et al], but there’s a bajillion user-based aggregators and ingestion libraries that make the RSS useful at the individual level.)

No benefit to user and no user empowerment is a pretty big double whammy and may explain why these microformats (nofollow excepted, which has the former and is automated and zero cost to a user) have yet to pop.

I left before the last questions were asked, when Marc was starting to get belligerent.

• Liz Lawley has some notes – also, mentions the how defining formats is clearly not emergent. This is something I found funny, and while not really relevant to my larger objections, in some fitting way does sum it up.