Hostels, RDFa, and Microformats

[Note: tech-oriented post -- read the non-tech version here]

[Edit for 2015: the information in this post is from 2009 and may be outdated. For current information, please see the Schema.org documentation and Google's Structured Data guidelines.]

Google just announced that they will begin to support Web technologies called RDFa and microformats:

• http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-adds-microformat-parsin.html
• http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/google-announces-support-for-m.html

These new technologies are ways to add machine-readable information to Web pages. The information is invisible to human visitors, but search engines and other tools can read this information.

People have been using microformats for years, but they haven't been widely supported (chicken or egg problem). Yahoo has indexing microformats for over a year, but Google's announcement is going to push them even further into the mainstream.

An example of a microformat is a blog tag. The tags in HostelManagement.com's hostel tag cloud have microformat information attached to them. Even though they just look like regular links, they have information attached that tells machines they are category tags.

If you want to view microformats in your browser, download the Operator extension for Firefox.

Here is an example of the Operator extension viewing microformat tags on HostelManagement.com -- the tags are highlighted on the left, and the actions available are on the right.

A "tag" is just one kind of microformat. There are also microformats for addresses, reviews, events, and much more.

The only hostel booking engine that has been using microformats so far is Boo.com which uses the hCard microformat. If you have Operator installed you can view it by going to any hostel's page. Here's an example from the page for Traveller's House:

• This is a list of people and companies on the page: Travellers House as well as each user who left a review.
• These are the actions available with the Operator extension, for example, automatically export to my address book or look up on Google Maps.
• The microformat information is invisible to human visitors. It looks like a regular webpage.

Here is a screenshot of importing the hostel into my address book:

To make this happen, Boo.com used the hCard microformat, as shown in this code snippet below:

<p class="adr"><span class="street-address">Rua Augusta, number 89, 1st floor</span>, <span class="locality">Lisbon</span></p>

Boo.com isn't the only site using microformats -- other sites have been using them too:

• Yelp.com
• Yahoo's Upcoming
• Yahoo Travel and Yahoo Local
• and many more

The easiest way you can use microformats in your hostel's website, besides having a blog or CMS that generates tags, is to use the hCard microformat which defines contact information like address and phone numbers.

If you know HTML, it's very easy. You just use regular HTML