It’s certainly old news by now, (since when are we on the cutting edge here?) but there’s a book out dedicated entirely to microformats.
Written by John Allsopp and published by Friends of Ed, Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 covers everything you need to know about microformats, from how they’re built (the process) to how to publish and parse them. Include are two case studies, one about corkd, another about Yahoo.
I haven’t read the entire book yet, but still I’d recomend it to anyone interested in microformats. John’s a great writer, and he built a great supporting cast for this book– it was tech edited by Brian Suda and includes contributions from Dan Cederholm and Nate Koetchly, among others.
Even if you feel you wouldn’t learn anything from the book, at the very least you can show it to your manager and say “look, it must be important, they’re writing books about it!”.
Links for the book:
Ryan 
Jeremy Keith