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I'm very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem. Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web.

Microformats enable any site to easily publish common data types such as tags, licenses, contacts, events, reviews, listings, etc. on any page on the Web, with only minor edits to their HTML. For me personally, this has meant enabling millions of people to take control of their own data, publish and update it wherever they want, whenever they want, and move it freely among services, without having it locked up behind a walled garden or trapped in a "roach motel".

Technorati believes in the voice of the individual, and their right to own and control their data.

In January 2005, Technorati developed the rel-tag open standard for tagging content on any blog across the Web, and enabled millions of bloggers to tag content on their own sites. The Technorati Tags service allowed bloggers to follow the conversation around all the amazing and unique tags that they invented.

The microformats.org open standards community has developed and popularized the hCard, hCalendar, and hReview open standards that enable any website to easily publish their contacts, events, and reviews respectively in HTML, in a form both viewable by humans and understandable by machines, without unnecessary duplication of effort.

We have worked with (and continue to work with) numerous publishers and content hosting sites -- including 30Boxes, BlogMatrix, ClaimID, Eventful, Flickr, Judy's Book, LiveJournal, Meetup, Odeo, Upcoming.org, WordPress, Yahoo! Tech, Yahoo! UK Movie Reviews (and many more) -- over the past year to support this growing ecosystem of open, sharable data. I'm grateful to all of them for their participation, support, and leadership of vision as we tear down the walls and allow users to mix and match their data as they've always wanted to.

This afternoon Technorati introduces a technology preview of microformats search for contacts, events, and reviews. Available now in the Technorati Kitchen, I invite you to come take a look at this first of a kind realtime microformats search engine, see what the team has worked very hard to build for you, and let us know what you think and what you want from microformats search.

If you are (or will be) publishing with microformats in your blog, and you're already pinging Technorati, then you are all set. Our new microformats search will index your microformats.

For all other kinds of web pages with microformats (e.g. about/contact pages, events calendars/listings, online product reviews, social networking profiles, conference schedules, your list of favorite restaurants, etc.), we're proud to introduce the Pingerati microformats pinger and distributor.

Whenever you publish or update such pages with microformats, use Pingerati to notify microformats indexers and aggregators, such as Technorati, EVDB, and several others in development.

Welcome to the realtime microformats web.

Tags: microformats, search, pingerati, ping, liveweb, realtimeweb, hCard, hCalendar, hReview.