Category: News

Jon Udell on search, the blogosphere, and microformats

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 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 . It’s true that the Web dwarfs the enterprise, but people who use form small communities around specific tags. Maybe such communities can flourish at enterprise scale.

The second strategy is . 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 and . In the enterprise, the nuggets would be things like meetings and status reports. People won’t know that these nuggets are embedded as 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.

Greasemonkey and Microformats

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.

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Flickr and Microformats

microforats magnifying glass

In the picture to the right, Stewart Butterfield of Flickr/Ludicorp/Yahoo is holding up a Microformats.org magnifying glass over a (name)tag that says “Sexy!”.Apparently, the nametag says “Stewart,” not “Sexy.” I swear there was a nametag around that said “Sexy,” and I swear I saw Stewart with it in his hands. Of course, I did have a few beers before that point. :)

Perhaps Flickr will even support microformats?

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