I've had a hard time "getting" RDF (e.g. how it differs from XML), but this article helps give it context. The semantic web is being built simultaneously from the bottom up and top down. Typifying the bottom-up approach, RDF content is machine-readable at the outset; powerful but complex (with several advantages over microformats), RDF is all about inter-operability. Top-down approaches introduce "metadata sprinkling" to existing content, simple but limiting by comparison e.g. microformats (using CSS class attributes as in hCard), or meta elements (meta tags such as those for geo-discovery). Both approaches are valid, but RDF is hard whereas microformats help "the rest of us" contribute to the semantic web. There may be a collision ahead, however, between microformats and RDFa (sprinklings of RDF embedded in existing XHTML).
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Some useful links Bruce. I lean towards the bottom-up approach and shall be investigating Semantify.
Interesting to see where the GeoTag and OpenShare icons go - personally I would like to see them in many more tools for machine reading, leading to a cleaner/simpler human viewed interface - but that must be the zen in me.
Imagine a machine-parsed RDF document reduced to nothing more than an informative row of icons for human viewing, all visual representations of semantic meaning...
[Stops screaming] I can't envisage myself ever siting down and hand-coding RDF as I do with XHTML. And I likewise can't see myself relying on automated tools in the near future that do for RDF what Microsoft Word churned out and termed "HTML". RDFa seems to be a halfway-house and at least as "graspable" as microformats.
Funny, I envisage a nice clean page of human readable text and maybe the odd picture to spice things up, with the machine doing all the heavy lifting...