Burningbird is dead on when she writes

[Burningbird � The Meta Wars

She who controls the metadata rules the world [...].

But when I suggested (see Stuctured Blogging versus Messy, Messy, Messy) that there is a choice to be made between the use of Structured Blogging and Microformats -- and note that advocates of both positioned the comparison between the two as a choice (see Microformats v Structutred Blogging: A Small War With Big Consequences) -- Shelly goes on to say

My first reaction was to say that Stow Boyd [sic] wouldn’t be able to find a leafy, green vegetable in a field of lettuce, but that wouldn’t be civil and god knows, we all need to be civil.

So instead what I’ll say is that microformats, which are adding tags to existing elements such as links, and Structured Blogging are not an either/or; same as neither is incompatible with my own RDF efforts. All efforts are bottom up; all efforts are top down; all support a semantic web because at some point, someone has to make a decision to attach a bit of metadata to a chunk of web space. How you do so is irrelevant.

Ouch. Yes, Shelley, let's try to have a kinder, gentler blogosphere.

Rather than arguing from first principles at length, I think I will wait and comment on the first actual uses of these various approaches, and we'll see what the adoption is, and so on. And we'll see, then, who is trying to capture the high ground in the Meta Wars.