Tantek reports about the microformats lab at FOOCamp, with Dave McClure publishing some notes.
On Friday night, Kevin and I did an impromptu talk on microformats at BarCamp.
Bill and Bradley both blogged it and many people asked very good questions and stayed with us, despite the hellish heat in the conference room.
Ryan
We just finished up a session titled “Microformats Lab” at FOO Camp. Dave McClure wrote up his notes from the session.
Tantek
Jon Udell recently wrote about IBM’s new search framework and the blogosphere which concludes with some interesting statements about microformats (hyperlinks added):
The more machine analysis we can do, the better. But we should also keep looking for ways to extract the semantic metadata that people carry around in their heads. As blogging begins to play a greater role in enterprise knowledge management, two strategies will present themselves.
First, there’s social tagging. It’s true that the Web dwarfs the enterprise, but people who use social tagging services form small communities around specific tags. Maybe such communities can flourish at enterprise scale.
The second strategy is microformats. The idea here is that your blogging tool should make it easy to post items that contain nuggets of structure. Examples on the public Web include calendar events and book reviews. In the enterprise, the nuggets would be things like meetings and status reports. People won’t know that these nuggets are embedded as XML fragments within their blog postings. They’ll just appreciate having an easy way to create styled elements, and an easy way to find them later.
Tantek
Odeo has just announced that they are supporting microformats.
They’re currently supporting rel-tag, rel-enclosure, and xfn and seem to be interested in media metadata.
See their blog post for more.
Ryan
George recently wrote and released:
…a Greasemonkey user script that will find those hCalendar events and provide a link to import them into any calendar program that supports the iCalendar format… any time you see an event on the web that has hCalendar information, you can click a link and it’ll be added to your calendar so you don’t have to copy the information by hand.
Nicely done George. Next up, who is going to write a Greasemonkey user script (or extend George’s) to detect hCards and provide links to import them into any address book program that supports the vCard format?
Update: George himself has written it. See his updated blogpost to get it.