[uf-discuss] Greetings microformatters

[Ryan King]

On Nov 29, 2005, at 8:20 AM, Ryan Cannon wrote:

> My name is Ryan Cannon and I am a master's student at U of M  
> studying human-computer interaction, semantic web design, and  
> basically looking for ways to contribute to the field. I read about  
> Microformats in the Digitial Web Magazine Primer  and more recently  
> in Boss & Lie's article in A List Apart. I think the idea of µf is  
> an incredible one—essentially codifying best practices for common  
> applications. I believe this will go a long way to abstracting  
> semantic XHTML development once the dev. tools support it well.

Welcome, a fellow grad student. :D

> Anyway, I've rooted around in the archives, but perhaps I've missed  
> something. Some in my field have uncovered that the way people  
> attempt to search the internet is much different than what the  
> technology allows. For instance, people want to search for  
> categories of web sites, e.g. news sites, personal sites,  
> informational sites, or stores. This does not convert well with the  
> Title/Description/Keyword and tags method currently in place. What  
> we're missing, to use the library analog, is a "subject" field.
>
> If it's already taking place, I'd like to join in the discussion  
> about embedding self-reported genre or subject metadata in web  
> pages. What this would allow, once properly implemented, is the  
> ability for search engines to do something along the following:

As Chris already meantioned, see http://microformats.org/wiki/rel- 
directory. Also, see http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-tag.

> Search for words: "Disney"
> In websites about: "Tourism"
> and not about: "Stores OR Merchandise"

Please excuse the gratuitous mention of my employer, but you can do  
this on technorati already. For example, this search will give you  
[most of] what you ask for:

http://technorati.com/search/disney?blogtag=tourism

(we don't have complex blogtag queries, just simple inclusion).

> Being new to this discussion, I'm not aware of the larger issues  
> around an idea like this, but a large one comes to mind: there's no  
> engine in place to take advantage of it. But that didn't stop XFN.
>
> Please send me your comments. I've begun to read some of the wiki  
> about proposing formats, but I'm nowhere near that stage. I'm more  
> interested in if this discussion is taking place, and the things to  
> keep in mind when talking about invisible metadata and search engines.
>
> Cheers,
> -- 
> Ryan Cannon
>
> Interactive Developer
> MSI Student, School of Information
> University of Michigan
> http://RyanCannon.com/
>
>
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--
Ryan King
ryan at technorati.com