Bud Gibson is proposing a new xFolk: An xhtml microformat for folksonomy that hopefully will create a standard that will let users share and export their tagged data more easily. The article is a very interesting read and makes use of existing technologies like XHTML and XMDP.
Bud’s work is inspired by panels at SXSW 2005 by Eric Meyer and Tantek Çelik that discussed emergent semantics and extending xhtml.
xFolk is an open xhtml microformat that allows users to publish their own folksonomy classifications for aggregation by the services they choose. As such, it starts to give back users control of their own data. A side benefit of xFolk is that users may designate explicit semantics for their folksonomy tags, providing a link to the more formal practices of information architects.
