Update: I forgot to point something out about my slides- when viewing them, if you hit the little Ø character (in the controls in the bottom-right corner) to view an outline version of the presentation, which includes some notes, which should hopefully help the slides make more sense to those who weren’t present.

What an awesome weekend.

WebZine 2005 (my first WebZine) was a wonderful collection of technologists, activists, journalists and various other -ists. This mixture made for a an very fertile arena for discussions- discussions of everything from legal issues to obscure HTML markup (that was me!).

I think my presentation went over well. You can see the slides on line here. I’ve tried to add notes on some of the slides, so that those of you who weren’t able to show up in person could still get the grasp of what I was trying to communicate. However, if you find anything that seems confusing, please feel free to ask (either in the comments here or in one of our other discussion channels).

There are actually a few questions that came up in the presentation (thanks Cal and Simon!) that I need to take some time to explain in written from (because they’re important and someone dense topics). I’ll hopefully get to them in the next few days.

(Thanks to Scott Beale for the photos on the right.)

Tags

• WebZine
• WebZine 2005
• Technorati
• Microformats
• Ryan King

As Tantek and I were working the other night at Maxfields, we came up with an an analogy for descibing the microformats principles.

Just to review, here are the principles we use for developing microformats:

• solve a specific problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for humans first, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

We noticed that the principles tend to follow the Three R’s of Environmentalism: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Here’s a possible breakdown we came up with:

• Reduce

  • solve a specific problem
  • start as simple as possible

• Reuse

  • design for humans first, machines second
  • reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards

• Recycle

  • modularity / embeddability
  • enable and encourage decentralized and distributed development, content, services

When reducing, we try to attack a specific problem, make it as simple as possible and simplify the format until it seems too simple.

When reusing, we try to model solutions on existing human behaviors and reuse existing widely deploy standards, names and approaches.

When we’re recycling, we try to salvage portions of other standards and make use of implicit schemas (ie, patterns which have yet to be formalized).

So, it seems that Microformats are really a conservation movement- conserving time, effort, and intellectual capital.

Tags

• Conservation
• Microformats
• Reduce, Reduse, Recycle

Joshua Allen blogged the Panel on the Future of RSS at Microsoft‘s PDC in Los Angeles, with great folks like Robert Scoble (moderator), Amar Gandhi (MSFT RSS), Jeff Barr (Amazon), Sanaz Ahari (start.com), Greg Reinacker (Newsgator), Mike Ehrenberg (MSFT MBS/CRM), and Doug Purdy. Two really great quotes that merit repeating here:

1. Audience:
   

   KISS. If you keep extending RSS, at what point does it become just another XML protocol.

2. Amar:
   

   It’s a vocabulary for representing data items; that seems a good place to keep it.

3. Doug:
   

   Agreed. As soon as you start introducing information entities, you’ve gone too far.

Precisely. If you keep extending a specific XML language like RSS with custom extensions, you end up with a mess and at worst, a Tower of Babel scenario. Keep RSS simple. It’s a nice envelope format for delivering a dated stream of items.

1. Audience:
   

   As you introduce extensions, does this replace RDF? Do you need to handle schema for extensions?

2. Amar:
   

   Talking about microformats with technorati, simple extensions and the social feedback loop. If you get into ontologies and taxonomy, it’s squishy.

Thanks for the kind mention Amar. I had the very good opportunity to meet with Amar and other members of the IE RSS team at Microsoft this past week at the PDC and we had an excellent discussion about microformats and how to use them to capture/publish “common” semantic structures in visible data, in HTML, RSS, etc.. Amar originally found out about microformats from Kevin’s post on Gnomedex calendar the microformat way.

Microsoft is one of the co-authors of hReview, and it’s great to see Microsoft’s RSS folks get involved with microformats as well. Welcome.

EconoMeta attended Bar Camp and wrote some thoughts about microformats:

Beyond their technical usefulness and practicality, microformats are interesting to me because so many of them seem to be centered around de-coupling personal data from application that might use that data.

Absolutely. This kind of modularity is core to microformats.

My focus here is on the economic value of stuff about stuff, and one example of that is that as a user on the internet, a lot of value is resident in the data about you, or the data that you create. If microformats help to separate this data from applications, it becomes easier to put it and its value under the control of the user, where I think it belongs.

This echoes a value many of us developing microformats have been promoting: users should own their data.

Microformats can do more than simply allow users to transfer their data from app to app, though. For public data, microformats enable a new model of application, where user data is crawled, aggregated, and made searchable in the same way that the raw text of web pages are now.

The plug-n-play application, assembled with small pieces loosely joined.

I hope that as things evolve, users who may not be interested in having a blog might nevertheless have an easy way to create and store data on the Internet, and control how it is used by these kinds of applications.

This is exactly correct. Microformats work very well not only for structured blogging, but what Brian Dear of EVDB called “structured webbing” this past weekend at Foo camp. All of this makes sense, as microformats are designed to enable and encourage decentralized development, content, and services.

It seems to me that this is a big part of the potential of microformats — a standardized way for users to allow access to their data and thus participate in a distributed application.

Introducing distributed applications. Powered by microformats.

Thanks to Assaf, we have an audio recording of our Barcamp discussion.

The mp3 weighs in at a hefty 32.8 MB and lasts an entire 71 minutes. Download it here.

(BTW, Assaf also blogged about this over at his blog.)

Tags

• BarCamp
• Microformats
• RyanKing
• kevinmarks

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