microformats Archive

Dogster announced yesterday that they are now supporting hCard microformats. They are also working towards supporting hListing and hReview. Some comments from Ted (Dogster CEO:

• The beauty of Microformats is that they use HTML class assignments such that you can simply markup your existing code to indicate which are the significant fields.
• This is not going to change the world or even Dogster. In fact most users won’t even know about these additions in our source code, but it will mean that as search engines are developed to find just this type of structured data, our pages will be easily indexed and found.

I like his last statement. Sometimes we do things behind the scenes that users will never "get" but they will reap the rewards of. Will Microformats rein supreme in 2007? Probably not. But will they over time, heck yea.

So you might be asking, why did I choose to highlight this? Simple. As you create your web apps, think about Microformats from the beginning. Dogster had to tweak their code (and use time/money) after the fact, but if you do it from the beginning, there is almost no incremental cost but could be larger benefits. To learn more about Microformats, check out microformats.org.

Lastly, my hats off to everyone on the Microformat discussion group. It is amazing to watch the messages go back and forth and the time and effort people are putting into making this a success.

I must admit that I don't have a ton of updates tonight. But here goes:

• I met Steve Poland today. I thought he was older, my bad. Anyway, Steve writes a blog at Techquila Shots and also guest posts on TechCrunch. He tried to get me to wear a TechCrunch tshirt but I had to decline (j/k). He's a bright guy and I enjoyed speaking with him.
• This afternoon I went to a panel on Microformats. These are the next big thing. Seriously. My mom will never get it and that's ok, but for geeks, it's like hot lovin'. This panel filled up the largest room they have. I was shocked frankly.  Tantek started by showing a history of microformats by taking off tshirts. I got a video of it but they keep the room so dark you can't make out the shirts.
• Wanna know scary? Scary is when you know who is speaking on the attendee mic without even turning around. It was Ted from Dogster and I tried to catch him on a pic but he moved too quickly!
• Went through the expo hall, BORING. I was so NOT impressed honestly. The podtech booth was nice but otherwise there wasn't much there. Considering this is the biggest interactive conference, where are the startups, where are the bigboys… Yahoo wasn't there, Google had a tiny setup, seemed more of the space was about film. Oh well, guess I go home without a bag full of crap… what will I give the kids for halloween this year? :)
• I am still looking for a date for Tuesday night

Ok, that's about it – more to come on Tuesday. As always, grab the feed and check the pics on flickr.

Last week, I wrote an article about Digg and whether they should change outbound links to use the "nofollow" attribute which (for some engines) would not give as much link juice as they currently provide. This was after Wikipedia went nofollow the week before.

So on my way to NYC this past weekend, I started drawing ideas in my notepad. And the best idea (I think) that came to me is the following. Remember that all of this is just an idea I have and not something I have put into practice on CenterNetworks (or any of my other sites).

Let's use my other site, HTMLCenter, as the example for this demonstration. The site has good traffic, a pagerank of 6 and has been around for 10 years. So the link juice is clearly worth a good bit based on the other text links on the site.

Now we review about 10-12 books a month and each one of those reviews includes links to the publisher and author web sites along with a link to Amazon to purchase the book. Each link is a followed link and so I am sending good amounts of juice to these companies. And so my question is why? Should I change these links to nofollow links?

And so this is where my new monetization model begins. It's really a simple idea. Here is how it would work:

• I post a product review as I always have on HTMLCenter
• All links from the story out become no follow
• I alert the company (like always) that their review is live
• In the email I let them know that the link is a nofollow link and that for $50 (made up amount), I can make the link a follow link
• Whether the company pays or not, the review remains the same

I am thinking this really is a great way to add some potential extra income for me monthly. And clearly I could do the same thing here on CN. The company is not paying for the review and its clearly not the same as Payperpost or ReviewMe. Reviews are posted prior to asking about follow payment, the reviews are not manipulated at all because I don't care whether you stay as a nofollow or pay me for a follow.

This might be a horrible idea, but at 35,000 feet, this is what I come up with! Alright so now I open my new monetization model for review and commentary. Pick holes in my idea, bash it, or love it – just be honest! Thanks in advance for feedback.

Neil over at Pronet Advertising has a post today discussing how a service called MarketWire appears to be spamming Digg by posting over 300 of their press releases on Digg. Not one hit the home page.

Last week, Wikipedia changed their external links to all use the microformat "nofollow" so that all outbound links carry no search engine optimization weight. So far it appears to be the right thing to do.

So my question is… should Digg do the same thing? When I look at the upcoming stories in Tech News (the biggest category), the posts come in like hot cakes. Besides the fact that so many are duplicates, how many are there for the sole purpose of gaining more inbound links.

I think going nofollow may remove a good bit of the "corporate" spam we see on Digg. Will people still spam Digg in the hopes of hitting the home page? Yep. But it may help deter users who are using Digg for the sole purpose of gaining inbound link traction.