In this light, the remarkable thing about Web 2.0 to date is the extent to which it has emerged from individual creativity. For instance, Google itself started as a research project, and many of Google's products have been created during the day a week employees are encouraged to spend on their own ideas. So, almost paradoxically, people's ability to understand Web 2.0 technologies and create with them, not the technology's machine processing characteristics, has been the determining factor in the growth of Web 2.0.

In effect, Web 2.0 is a combination of machines and people, not just machines communicating on their own. Likewise, xhtml microformats are a combination of machine processable xml and human understandable html. Ins some sense, this makes xhtml microformats perfect for implementing Web 2.0. As Ryan King puts it so eloquently,

... the measure should not be “how expressive is this technology?” but “how much does this encourage and facilitate personal expression?”

theryanking.com » Follow up on Microformats