I’ve been thinking about how we can move microformats and structured blogging from the realm of interesting but niche to ubiquity. There are four obvious steps that most technologies go through before they gain widespread acceptance.

[1] Initial concept - The microformat guys have the core concepts and standards nailed. The SB guys rightly use standards rather than creating them and their vision for SB is very clear.

[2] Reference Implementation - Apart from rel=tag, which has been an enormous success due to Technorati itself, most of the other uF tools seem to be either quick hacks or programmers trying things out on hCard. Until recently, there was no great reference implementation that would really get the wider developer community’s juices flowing. I think that changed with Live Clipboard which is a lovely simple idea that drives home the utility of microformats. Similarly, the SB plug-ins are a fantastic proof of concept and allow for immediate experimentation.

[3] Sufficient Utility - A perfect example of this is del.icio.us. A great tool and great site with genuine benefit and utility for users. It has widespread acceptance in the technical community and provides sufficient hooks for developers that they want to build bigger and better things around it or in competition to it. But in terms of overall web-user penetration it is a minnow.

Once Technorati do some end-user-visible things with uF, I see adoption happening quickly in the technical community. Have they thought about creating a uF aware competitor to del.icio.is?

Once the SB plug-ins for WP and Typepad are a seamless part of those platforms, add no extra effort to blogging and get installed by default on wordpress.com et al, the growth in usage will be huge and will not be limited to the technical community.

[4] Killer App - The holy grail of Apps which break through to the wider web-user community. Apps which make people start using the web for the first time. Flickr is the obvious one recently.

This is the step which may not involve the uF or SB originators at all. And this is the bit where, for uF and SB, there appears to be very little happening yet. The first attempts at this are bound to be some sort of “My Tagged Life” aggregators which are popping up everywhere. I think that transformation to ubiquity will come with implementations which leap off the desktop-based web and insert themselves into the everyday life and interactions of the average connected person.