Jon Udell recently wrote about IBM’s new search framework and the blogosphere which concludes with some interesting statements about microformats (hyperlinks added):

The more machine analysis we can do, the better. But we should also keep looking for ways to extract the semantic metadata that people carry around in their heads. As blogging begins to play a greater role in enterprise knowledge management, two strategies will present themselves.

First, there’s social tagging. It’s true that the Web dwarfs the enterprise, but people who use social tagging services form small communities around specific tags. Maybe such communities can flourish at enterprise scale.

The second strategy is microformats. The idea here is that your blogging tool should make it easy to post items that contain nuggets of structure. Examples on the public Web include calendar events and book reviews. In the enterprise, the nuggets would be things like meetings and status reports. People won’t know that these nuggets are embedded as XML fragments within their blog postings. They’ll just appreciate having an easy way to create styled elements, and an easy way to find them later.