se.m.edia

I can see many valid things in Keith's post about uF and the Semantic Web (like 'Things have URIs'), but I like most his conclusion:

So in other words, Microformats are not, in themselves, building, or contributing to, the semantic web. They can be made to join the semantic web, but this requires extra effort on the part of individual authors – it does not come ‘for free’ when ‘doing microformats’. 

Now, this is really good news: Flickr is rolling out a new feature called machine tags that allows users to be more precise in how they tag, and how they search, their photos.

Machine tags are tags that use a special syntax to define extra information about a tag; they have a namespace, a predicate and a value. The namespace defines a class or a facet that a tag belongs to ('geo', 'flickr', etc.), and the predicate is the name of the property for a namespace ('latitude', 'user', etc).