I’ve been reviewing books for some time now, here on my blog. You can see here the list. From the start I’ve been using a microformat – hReview – to enable me to more easily use that information in the future. It’s like a mini-API for my content. I also ping Pingerati to spread them through out the web.

First I’m going to explain a bit the microformat, showing how I usually put it here.

hReview

<div class="hreview">

<img src="http://...../freakonomics.jpg" alt="Freakonomics" class="photo" />

<div class="description item">

<a href="http://www.freakonomics.com" class="fn url">Freakonomics</a> was written 
by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

...
[Insert here awesome review of the book]
...

</div>

<div class="information" style="display:none;">
  <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20070624T0114Z">June 24, 2007</abbr>  by
  <span class="reviewer vcard">
    <span class="fn">Sérgio Santos</span>
    <a href="http://sergiosantos.info" class="url">Website</a>
  </span>
  <span class="type">product</span>
</div>

</div>

You can simply copy-paste the above code if you want to use hReview on your reviews, it’s not book only. Basically you just create a main tag with the class ‘hReview’ and then mark all the data with more class specifications: photo, url, fn (Formatted name), dtreviewed (in ISO8601 absolute date time – {year}{month}{day}T{hour}{minutes}Z for the UTC timezone), etc…

By andrewlmurphy at Flickr.

In the end you can add an optional reviewer hCard, where the main class is vCard, not hCard, and where I simply added my name and website. If you notice, I used style="display:none;" in the last block of information. I did that because, although it has important information for parsers, I don’t need to tell in my blog that I am the reviewer or again indicate the date.

You can also name the type of the review. However the possibilities are fairly generic: product, business, event, person, place, url. Many things fall under the product category, such as books. So to indicate what sub-type of product your reviewing the choice is to use the rel=’tag’ microformat, inserting somewhere inside the main div block:

Book:

Movie in DVD format:

<a rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie">movie</a>
<a rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD">DVD</a>

This isn’t probably the best solution and it isn’t still in many of the reviews already with microformats. But cataloging your reviews is important. Imagine someone who wants to build, instead of a generic aggregator of reviews, one dedicated to books only. It would be very difficult to guess if it’s a book, a music album, a washing machine someone’s reviewing and the hole process couldn’t be automated.

So now I encourage you to start using hReview on your blog or, for example, on your reviewing network. It’s the best way to free your content, because in this era, static content as almost no value.

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