You might have heard: the Associated Press and the Media Standards Trust have launched a new  news microformat proposal.

Microformats are interesting because they are a relatively easy way of describing content that is intelligible to both humans and machines.  Initiatives like these should make it easier to manage the huge torrent of news and information that is threatening to overwhelm us.

Its quite simple; just read this (and maybe try it out):


Using microformats makes your data easy to consume and publish in a standardized way, so that you can do things like make your data available for indexing, searching or to do tasks like download a contact’s information or add an event to your calendar simply.

The new proposal will ‘wrap’ each story with basic information, like:
- what its about,
- where it was written,
- who wrote it,
- where it was published,
- the news principles it adheres to (if any),
- any usage rights associated with it.


The proposed microformat is now being tested on all AP text content. News stories are available in the new format via the AP Developer API, which also is in beta testing, and AP’s Web Feeds platform, an internet-based distribution platform for AP. The Associated Press (www.ap.org), a not-for-profit organization headquartered in New York, is the world’s largest global news agency. More information on the microformat can be found at www.valueaddednews.org.

But, I really got a good insight into the relevance of microformats and how they fit into the news context from this post on a New York Times blog (way back in 2007, but it’s still a good read):


The small scope of microformats may make you ask “is that it?”, but this succeeds through simplicity where other mechanisms have faltered. Unlike XML, which really can represent anything to the point that no two sites agree on schemas, microformats mandate a universal structure for data records that machine parsers to read. Also, unlike XML APIs, which live separated from the Web sites humans read, microformats are fragmentary precisely so they can exist hidden within the content of Web pages to help the machines that might take advantage of them.