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TeleBlog regular Branko Collin gave a nice explanation of how microformats could aid pickups of information from book reviews for Technorati. Josh Gay of the Free Software Foundation, whom I met Friday at a library conference in NYC, has also been a big booster of the concept. I  can see why. As described by Wikipedia, “any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.”

That sounds anti-commerce. But actually microformats could help even commercial sites by, say, bringing more traffic to a book review magazine than it would receive otherwise. Theoretically Yahoo could create a page listing reviews for a certain book and automatically pick up ratings from each publication’s writeup. Such a capability, in turn, might just drive you to visit the sites and see how the reviewers justified the rating. What’s more, other sites could ride Yahoo’s coattails and reproduce the Yahoo page.