What the hell are microformats, I hear some say?

I don’t know either, but whatever they are, Google doesn’t have them.

According to ZDNet:

“The main benefit of this is it makes Web data more structured, because microformats are a way to standardize on different types of data – events, listings, calendar, etc“

And a further benefit to some in the SEO “republishing” community…

“The real benefit of structured content is that it makes it possible (or at least a lot easier) to create new aggregation services. Because data is consistently marked-up using microformats, it takes the pain factor of scraping and other workarounds away“

Oh my god….