Two thumbs down! This is the "Scared Straight" guide to raising awareness about the semantic web and microformats. Unfortunately, it has absolutely *nothing* to do with ASP.NET or ASP.NET developers, and he forgot to define 'semantic web' and 'microformats' for any interested readers. In other words, just a screed by one developer on how nobody cares about something in which he's deeply interested.

Mads, your writeup on implementing microformats (linked at the very bottom of the post: http://blog.madskristensen.dk/post/Implement-micro-formats-on-your-website.aspx ) pretty much sums up why nobody except some fringe perl/python/ruby devs care about any of this:

"Both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 will support micro formats natively. If you cannot wait for the next version of Firefox or IE, then you can download the Operator micro format extension for Firefox and start testing your site." You wrote that 6 months ago. FF3 and IE8 still aren't out. WTF dude? It would be way more effective for you to write about what the semantic web looks like from the IE8 and FF3 betas. Save your whining for the 30% of the web-browsing world that still runs IE6--and the 50% who will still be running IE7 when you complain in another year about how I'm holding back the semantic interwebs revolution.

:):,(:(;( Don't like your summary

The summary of the article makes me wanna "unkick" even if I didn't have kicked it :)

Interesting subject matter, but from the Microformats.org web site itself:

"microformats are not:
* an attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
* a whole new approach that throws away what already works today
* a panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions"

Using FUD to convince people to take a look at them is probably not the best approach ;) I believe that if something is useful and has real worth, it'll eventually catch on mostly by itself -- my favorite example being RSS. Continue to share examples and give real use-case scenarios and people will pay attention if they see value.

I'm going back to sleep

Personally, I agree that Asp.Net developers (myself included) need to wake up...just not for the same reasons.

What I want Asp.Net developers to learn is JavaScript. I can't tell you how many times I've seen perfectly decent developer cower at the thought of writing a bit of JavaScript on the browser. It isn't healthy.
Better yet, learn a JavaScript library like JQuery, Prototype, MooTools, YUI, or even the AJAX Library JavaScript extensions ($get() anyone?).

This is something you can use right NOW, not 2 years from now when technology xyz has hit critical mass to be useful.