Imagine if your browser is not only a markup rendering engine, and it acts as an information broker. We usually visit different websites to fulfill our needs or daily activities like buying & selling something, gather some information or manage our social network. The general model is we travel to a particular site then proceed to enter data. Information is scattered in the web we have to choose which site we want to use. If we don’t have any idea which site to use then we search it on the web. Imagine a scenario i want to sell my old car and i blog about it, and a classifieds website find it when it aggregate advertisements across the web.

Have you been over hearing people talk about Microformats and thought to yourself “what are those?”

Microformats can be defined as

simple conventions for embedding semantic markup for a specific problem domain
in human-readable (X)HTML/XML documents, Atom/RSS feeds, and “plain” XML
that normalize existing content usage pattern
using brief, descriptive class names
often based on existing inter operable standards
to enable decentralized development
of resources, tools, and services

Examples:
Flickr using microformats which lets user to geotag their photos
upcoming.yahoo.com using hCalender microformat to aggregate events.