PlanetEye
Travel Beyond Words
October 30th, 2008
Better Blogs with Microformats
- Juan Gonzalez
- Vice President, Technology
Knowing that original and recent reviews written by local bloggers would help us establish relevancy on the places for each one of our featured cities, we invited around 50 professional travel writers to produce content for PlanetEye. To keep things nicely integrated into the rest of our site we gave these Local Experts tools not only to write but associate their posts to specific places on the map. This helps the reader understand context and allows us to create a relationship to the article from the place referenced. This has worked really well so far: our collective pool of Local Experts have written over 3,500 articles, 50% of which are associated with a place.
So for example while a review with proper references to location would look like this:
The featured place, in this case a restaurant, would have the proper reference to the original post:
We realize our Local Experts are not the only people with a professional opinion on destinations around the world. We’ve come across hundreds of bloggers that feature terrific content. They all have unique methodologies to scout their cities looking for great destinations, they all are diligent about documenting location and other important information as well as writing a great review. Mapplr.com comes to mind as a good example.
We would love to integrate the wisdom of these reviews in the same way we have done so for our Local Experts: by creating a relationship between their review and the places they are talking about in such a way that the aggregation of this information can create a more interesting profile of a city.
To make this happen, we are endorsing Microformats and have put together a white paper that explains our suggested approach to implement them when writing hotel or restaurant reviews. It contains very simple instructions to get started producing structured content.
Already this month has been an interesting one for Microformats with the launch of Oomph, Microsoft’s Microformats Toolkit and enhanced Firefox support.
Download the white paper.
Tags: firefox, microformat, oomph
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April 20th, 2009 at 11:10 am
[...] in October I wrote a post endorsing Microformats as a way for bloggers to include location information within their posts. With this post we had [...]