A quick-fire round up of what’s happened in the microformats world this week; new implementations, major mailing list discussions and microformat-related discussion from the web at large.

New implementations

• Kenji Matsuoka at Alexa has written hCard Search, an hCard search engine written in Java for the Alexa Web Search Platform.

Also, Drew McLellan posted a teaser of a Microformats Firefox toolbar, and a new Microformats in Drupal group has formed to see better implementation of microformats in the Drupal CMS.

From uf-discuss

• The ‘Custom Fields Microformat’ thread discusses a not-uncommon desire to describe arbitrary key-value pairs with a microformat. Tantek Çelik responds with a thorough explanation as to why this falls outside the scope of microformats.

On the web

• Jeremy Keith presented microformats at the Refresh 06 conference in Orlando and published a cream-of-crop compilation of microformats resources referenced in his talk.
• The far reaching discussion about decentralised social networking using XFN and hCard gained traction following a frustrated screenshot from Jon Hicks and related blog post by Derek Featherstone. Jeremy Keith outlines a solution that is realistic and implementable with microformats.

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and del.icio.us, and so forth). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, tag it ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ as well.