A game changer?

This post by Dries Buytaert caught my attention. Google has announced that it is going to embrace (therefore drive mass adoption of) some of the ideas of the semantic web through the introduction of rich snippets. It is a game changer in oh-so-many ways, not least in that it forces the reevaluation of a lot of SEO strategies and should allow users to reliably identify data of the same 'type' across different websites.

If you have been paying attention over the last ten years, the identification of structured data through microformats and RDFa is something many could see the logic of and the need for, but also could see no mechanism for getting this obviously 'good idea' widely adopted.  So, on behalf of those of us who suspected that microformats and RDFa might go the way of Betamax, I would like to thank Google for gaining the dominance they have just to be able to drive the mass adoption of structured data standard formats on the web.

And while I wait for Drupal 7 to arrive, I will decide how to implement microformats* or RDFa in Drupal 6.

* Yes, I know it is a dead link...