The 2nd and 3rd of September saw the first BarCamp event in the UK, held at Yahoo! HQ in London.

Participants came from all areas of technology and web development, but the local Microformateers were in attendance and created a mini-track on the second day with 3 back-to-back presentations.

The first was my own and consisted of a brief introduction to Microformats, what they are, and how they should be used. Most of the session was discussion based and allowed those new to Microformats to air their confusions and also lead nicely into the pros and cons plus Microformats versus other technologies. Jeremy Keith was especially vocal and was a great help during this session.

Following this, Glenn Jones took over with a more indepth look at a specific use of Microformats in the d.Construct backnetwork. He showed the attendees around the implementations, and also shared his experiences with Microformats and building an application that was build around them rather than including them as an after thought.

Finally Drew Mclellan stepped in with “Parsing Microformats – Publishing is for Wimps”. This presentation, as the name suggests, discussed the difficulties in parsing Microformats and explanation of some tools that do this – and more specifically a look at the code in his hKit which is his own parser built in PHP5.

The weekend was a real success story for Microformats with many attendees having never encountered them before BarCamp but leaving with the knowledge, enthusiasm and intent to incorporate them into their own builds!