2006-in-review

This is a draft of some text for a 2006 year in review for the microformats blog. Feel free to add more information, events, link etc. then it can be distilled down for the main page of the site

2006, Year in Review

Just when you thought you wouldn't have to read another "year in review" blog post…

Last year I did a <a href="http://microformats.org/blog/2006/01/04/2005-year-in-review/">2005 year in review post</a>. I decided too look back and see how much of that came true, how far we've come, and make a few 2007 predictions.

In terms of community, I think Microformats has blossomed from the hand-full of folks who started it all, to a thriving community of people contributing to the mailing list, the wiki, writing blog posts, writing books and articles, and evangelizing microformats within their organizations and communities.

We've also seen Microformats creep into the mainstream. At Mix06 Bill Gates said <a>"We need more Microformats"</a>, we saw the possibilities of "<a>Live Clipboard</a>", an application to do a "smart copy and paste" from the web to desktop applications, "<a>Live Writer</a>", a new blogging writer that uses microformats for events, rumblings of <a>FireFox 3 natively supporting Microformats</a>, <a>IE 8 as well</a>. We've seen <a>Apple computers use hCard</a> in their web Mail and <a>Flickr introduce geo-tagging</a> of images and within weeks there were millions of instances of microformatted data available. We've even seen Microformats make it to the <a>homepage of the W3C</a>.

If 2005 was the year we hammered out formats, then 2006 was the year of adoption. As Microformats were presented at <a>BarCamps and conferences worldwide</a>, more and more people started to add <a>hCards</a>, <a>hCalendar</a> and <a>hReviews</a> to their blogs. With all the enthusiasm several sites have popped-up that are dedicated to microformats, <a>microformatique.com</a> and <a>whymicroformats.com</a> are just two. Among the many usefimplementations, the new 'operastor' toolbar for Firefox is noteworthy.

So what does 2007 hold? There is still lot of work going on both developing existing formats and working on new ones. In 2006 there were Microformat presentations at several big conferences. In 2007 there will be even more - in fact, if you look at Conference proposals, microformats has been broken out into it's own bullet point under web-technologies.

Ongoing proposals which may well come to fruition in 2007 include currency (for amounts of money), species (for the names of living things), and an extension to geo (to allow for the marking-u[ of coordinates on the Moon, Mars and such bodies) [+ others?].

My predictions for 2007 include more Microformats related books, articles and presentations. Microformats integration with other technologies, such as <a>GRDDL</a> and <a>SPARQL</a> to help bridge the gap to <a>Tim Berners Lee's vision of the Semantic Web</a>. <a>Dan Cederholm</a> said Microformats are "Oblivious Development"(???). Which means that for little extra effort you can add Microformats to your site and without even knowing it, you are allowing other people to develop highly advanced applications using the data. 2007 will see more mash-ups that couldn't have been done previously without Microformatted data. With the <a>W3C starting to incrementally advance HTML</a> there are opportunities to bake some of the semantics of Microformats right into the next version of HTML. The WHATWG, which is working on their version of <a>HTML5</a>, has added two new elements <calendar> and <contact> which are analogous to hCalendar and hCard. I would bet some of the Microformats principles and formats will be seen in the next versions of HTML.

Work that needs to be done in 2007 includes more advocacy, evidence gathering for xxx, cheatsheet creation and refinement, wiki development and translation, plus xxxx. Why not get involved?

As for everyone involved in the community, you should look back on 2006 with pride. We've done a lot of work and it wouldn't have been possible without your support.

Comment

• Would this be better in the second-person-plural ("Last year we did...", "Our predictions...")? Andy Mabbett