Can someone explain in short words?

Developers interested in semantics often embed extra semantics in their X/HTML by using 'meaningful' values for attributes such as CLASS, REL and ID. By 'meaningful', I meant to humans who read the code

Microformats are conventions for such behaviour - so that developers can standardise these semantics, allowing for parsers to locate and aggregate that information (eg, making the semantics machine-readable)

 An example is hCard which is a 1:1 XHTML representation of the Vcard specification for contact details. Technorati have created a search engine that finds microformats such as hCard - see this search (http://kitchen.technorati.com/contact/search/Tantek) for Tantek Çelik

That's the simple version I can give you a long version with more links, if you like? 

Or go to http://microformats.org/

This  Why Microformats documentation is intended for web developers, but curious surfers may enjoy knowing what they will be using soon.

Cool..... so I finally have an inkling of what microformats are 

Dek -

very basically

It's a marker (or identifier) for finding information.

yups....

(and i'm not a coder) 

everything else is just garnish