I am in no way an expert when it comes to microformats but I must admit that when Jed pointed out this article on hCards I was completely unfamiliar with the subject matter. I hadn\'t even heard of the format! Regardless, I think the motivation behind it is a solid one; provide markup around your data so search engines can properly index the types of data. That being said, the markup itself is pretty ugly. Check out the examples to see the onslaught of span tags and attributes that have to wrap around all your text to give it context:

​<span itemprop=\"location\" itemscope itemtype=\"http://data-vocabulary.org/​Organization\">
   ​<span itemprop=\"name\">Warfield Theatre</span>
   ​<span itemprop=\"address\" itemscope itemtype=\"http://data-vocabulary.org/Address\">
       <span itemprop=\"street-address\">982 Market St</span>, 
       <span itemprop=\"locality\">San Francisco</span>, 
       <span itemprop=\"region\">CA</span>
   </span>
   <span itemprop=\"geo\" itemscope itemtype=\"http://data-vocabulary.org/​Geo\">
      <meta itemprop=\"latitude\" content=\"37.774929\"></meta>
      <meta itemprop=\"longitude\" content=\"-122.419416\"></meta>
   </span>
</span>

Even if you\'re not a developer you can agree that\'s not easy on the eyes. I\'m not really clear why this data can\'t be provided in meta tags and must be marked up in the page (yes there is redundancy there but it would keep things cleaner, which I think we\'d all appreciate).

Long story short, I think I will roll this out for the Mercy Lounge and We Own This Town sites to see if it has any sort of impact on search results. It can\'t hurt, right?