Munkii Magic

An intertesting event happened to me today. For the first time in over a year I read about something and though “cool, that is worth sharing”. The semantic marking up of Event data and what google is going to be doing with it.

I am currently working for a large “organiser of trade and consumer events” where we are in the process of building a CMS platform, on top of EPiServer, to enable the different events to have a compelling presence on the Internet. We often have to display Event data and from time to time I have looked at using Microformats but mainly ‘cos I thought that was the right thing to do not because i could see any really compelling use of them, until now.

Last year Google introduced “Rich Snippets”. Using microformats to signal particular datatypes Google could pull through that data and display it alongside the Site Title in the Google results

This image shows a search result displaying a Review, Google also added support for People and later Video. On Friday Google posted on the Webmaster Central Blog (an excellent read) that they are now supporting Event data. Whilst I am going to have to wait a while to get that on our official Product Backlog and I am going to mark this auspicious event (me posting a blog for the first time in over a year) with some Event mark-up.