microformats

Part 1 of Rant - Recommendations from Yelp, foursquare, etc  are useless because there's no way to validate expertise and no identity

social+local+expert data = relevant recommendations aka Yelp, Foursquare, urban spoon, etc are walled garden data silos of doom NOT destiny and they don't really help you find the awesome restaurant  or espresso g*d shot you are looking for despite Fred Wilson's experience (an exception that proves the rule)

Part 2 of Rant - Don't trust your review data not to be compromised and not to be deleted when using a service like Yelp, foursquare, etc

You may be elite-2011-taster-273487 on yelp or urban spoon but or other such location based or recommendation based service, but:

1. you don't own your data e.g. your reviews
2. you can't export your data
3. why should anybody believe that it's you or trust your reviews when it's impossible to figure out who you are e.g. who is JudyS_240394 ?
4. your data will be sold (only Apple seems to have the guts not to sell user data)
5. what happens when the wonderful service goes out of business or "pivots"? 

Part 3 of Rant - Solutions - for now: copy to your site, future: open formats are the only long term way to get out of the silo

It's unfortunate that in 2011 that the best way to build up a consistent reputable, verifiable, track record for reviews or anything else that's structured beyond mere text is still to to have your own site e.g. a blog .

The best pragmatic compromise is to somehow copy the data you post in walled garden data silos of doom back to a site you control on your domain (unfortunately most walled garden sites don't allow you to get your data out without compromise; exceptions that prove the rule: flickr and instagr.am)

Or flip it around: Make your site the master and copy the data out to walled gardens like twitter, yelp, facebook etc is probably a better short term pragmatic solution. Not surprisingly the usual suspects :-) like Dave Winer and Tantek are pioneering this (check out Tantek's falcon system).

And in the long term, a "beyond unstructured blog of text" open API or data format for things like reviews which we have been discussing since 2004 (e.g. microformats) will actually happen. I remain optimistic about that :-) !

Yes, the current structured blogging effort is not optimal and neither are microformats. But yes the blogging world needs more structure that doesn't compromise its easy to create content nature! Two examples from something I love: recipes and digital camera reviews. Wouldn't it be great to have recipe aggregators and review aggregators so when you are cooking and buying stuff you could get consolidated, rich view from blogs rather than random results from Google searches (that are currently compromised by spammers and commercial information free "reviews"). I know that most of the good recipes and reviews are on blogs NOT on CNET or Yahoo or epicurious or the big sites or even opinions but try finding them with a search engine. Good luck!

And as Marc Canter says more normal people (or "humans" :-) as Marc likes to call them!) will write reviews and recipes than work with the blank "digital paper" slate of blogs as they stand today.

So I think the structured bloging advocates and Kedrosky are both right: we need more easy to use structure AND existing bloggers won't change (at least not overnight).

In either case, Drupal already has the ability to generate any format from its database and the ability to easily create content types for any more structured approach. Today, for instance, Drupal already has content types other than blog posts like "stories", "books" and "audio" and "video". Bottom line, I am not worried about what happens. With Drupal and its excellent community of developers who have written and will continue to write many amazing modules to generate a wide variety of content, I am covered!

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Structured Blogging Will Flop.:

QUOTE

Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging - the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they're posting - is going to be a flop.

UNQUOTE