Microformats feel as though they want to be popular but I'm not hearing too much about them; maybe I travel in the wrong circles.
I'm keen to know if you are using them on your site and whether they have proven popular.
I'm also keen to understand how you track their uptake/usage and how they have worked for you in your particular scenario/venture.
Thanks Scott
Related questions:
Anyone out there implement(ing) microformats? is this useful?
I'm using rel="me" on my site. Not sure though how much it helps search engines, but it's there for them.
Whenever I'm writing up a new blog post or creating new web pages, I try to include as much machine-readable information as possible. Rel tags are one common approach to semantic markup, but in terms of actual microformats, they're not as common.
We're currently working on an enhancement at The Office where we'll be providing contact information for lists of business representatives in hCard format, which you'll likely find is one of the most common formats beside hCalendar for events.
The thing about microformats is that you generally don't see them unless you're actively looking. They are, after all, there primarily for machine use - not human. The other thing is that unless you're consciously going out of your way to structure data in a microformat spec to meet a specific business need, you will likely not see a need to provide that information. You may not even be aware that it exists.
In terms of tracking which has the greater uptake or whether your particular implementation is getting traction, there aren't any official or formal measures in place. For global trends, Google Trends shows that RDFa is gaining a lot more ground on the simpler Microformat specification. This is likely because awareness and adoption of Semantic Web techniques is increasing. From a local "just my site, thanks" point of view, you could use your stats package (GA, Piwik, Clicky, etc) to track clicks on your microformat action links (e.g. "save to Outlook") as campaigns or use a JavaScript library to perform some behind-the-scenes action when the user interacts with your data.
Within my sites, I use rel="me" to link my personal profiles together across the web. Many social sites across the web use this pattern to mark up links back to the site you specify in your profile. For example, you can see this in action on your Stack Overflow profile page. By connecting your profiles across websites, this allows tools such as Google's Social Graph API to do interesting things with your cross-network social graph.
Microformats such as hCard and hReview are also actively being used by Yahoo! in its SearchMonkey tool to allow search results to be edited depending on the information in the page. Google has also recently started making use of Microformatted data in its search results. It's entirely possible that by marking up data in a machine readable way that you'll end up improving your search engine rankings as you make it easier for the search engines to know what your pages are actually about.