I said this yesterday, but I think it bears some repeating.

Microformats are the Nano-technology of Web 2.0

Microformats are XML schemas for small things like address cards, calendar entries and even wiki or blog entries. If everyone uses the same format, integrating information across multiple systems becomes very easy.

RSS is a microformat. Think about how valuable RSS is and you realize how valuable Microformats can be.

If Web Office tools are designed to make it so that people can quickly and easily conform to Microformats, then their work becomes quickly leveragable.

Yesterday, I posted about Structured Blogging. I think a better term would be Leveraged Blogging. Or in the Web Office context, Leveraged Content.

The practical examples, and the practical need for microformats exists all over the place.

Here is a list of formats that I have seen a need for in the Financial Services industry:

• Company Legal Entity Hierarchies - is Joe’s Garage related to Joe’s Pizza
• Credit card loans
• Mortgage loans
• A Sarbanes Oxley Risk and Associated Control
• HR Reporting Hierarchy
• Loan Probability of Default Grade and Percentage Estimate
• Loan Loss Given Default Grade and Percentage Estimate
• Counter-party Contact Information
• Shipping Instructions
• Holiday Calendar

In an ideal Services Orientated Architecture, Web 2.0 world, companies would devote services soles to name of these subjects. For example, they would have a single counter-party Legal Entity identity service. That way a bank could tell that the guy who signed up for a mortgage was the same guy who bought a car. Today, believe it or not, banks spend literally hundreds of millions on trying to mine their own database systems to get the answers to these kinds of questions. I have seen this first hand.

The field is only just beginning, but the team at www.microformats.org has the potential to become as important as the people as the W3C.

There is also plenty of reason to believe that with information traveling between companies, it will make more sense from a refactoring point of view for companies to work with 3rd party vendors who hold some of this microformat content in co-ordinated ASP solutions.