Month: March 2006

Bill Gates at Mix06 – “We need microformats”

Bill Gates is giving the opening keynote here at Mix06, providing an overview of the conference for the 1700+ folks in the audience. After presentations by folks from MySpace and the BBC, Bill invited Tim O’Reilly on stage to have a conversation.

While discussing “Web 2.0”, Tim just said:

…the semantic web is really taking off with the use of microformats.

And in response, Bill said:

We need microformats and to get people to agree on them. It is going to bootstrap exchanging data on the Web…

…we need them for things like contact cards, events, directions…

And there you have it. Bill Gates says we need microformats. We’ve got . We’ve got . Bill also wants a directions microformat. Who wants to start the research for a directions microformat? Perhaps start by documenting and dissecting the examples of directions provided by MSN, Google, and Yahoo’s respective mapping services.

tags:

Microformats at SxSW

There’ll be a microformats panel here at South by SouthWest in about 30 minutes. Come, here some description of what microformats are and see some demonstrations of simple tools that make use of microformats.

After the panel, we’re going to have a microformats lunch, for anyone interested in talking about microformats. Just meet outside the meeting room (17, I believe) after then panel to walk over to lunch.

Update:

Speakers:

Links:

Ray Ozzie on Microformats

Yesterday, at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference, Ray Ozzie, CTO of Microsoft, gave a demo of Live Clipboard, a Microsoft system which enables copying and pasting structured information from the web.

Read his post about it and watch the screencasts to get the ideas behind it and see the program in action.

Of interest to the microformats community, some of the demonstrations included the hCard and hCalendar microformats from the microformat-friendly Eventful.com.

If anyone has more info about the microformats support in this application, I’d love to hear about it, drop me a line.

Tags:

hAtom 0.1

A number of folks, most notably David Janes, have been working a format called hAtom for quite some time.

hAtom has been created to enable using HTML documents as syndication feeds. It was been built after studying the emergent semantics of blog publishers (ie, what are the common HTML elements and attributes in blogs and other syndicatable media) and existing syndication formats (ie, RSS and Atom).

Anyway, hAtom looks really promising and after ironing out some issues in a face-to-face meeting at MashupCamp, we put the 0.1 stamp on it and are now inviting people to start using it seriously.

So, if you have a blog, or any other publishing system that could do with some syndication, have a go at implementing hAtom on your site. If you run into any problems or have any questions, feel free to jump into one of our discussion channels to ask for help.

tags

Microformats voted best session at W3C Technical Plenary Day!

The W3C held their annual Technical Plenary Day meeting just yesterday in Mandelieu, France.

Tantek Çelik (Technorati) and Dan Connolly (W3C) moderated a session on Microformats with fellow presenters Ian Hickson, Håkon Wium Lie and Rohit Khare. Event details and links to presentations are on the wiki page for the event.

After all the sessions, the attendees voted for the best session (among eight choices) of the day and overwhelmingly chose Microformats!

Congratulations and thanks to my fellow co-moderator Dan Connolly and the presenters, and to the entire microformats community for all their hard work.

You should all be very proud of this level of recognition/appreciation by W3C members.

Tantek

P.S. For my presentation, I started off with a live demonstration (that I encouraged the audience to follow along with themselves on their on laptops, and which you too can try yourself) of going to the W3C Technical Plenary Agenda Day page, and then using the Technorati Contacts Feed service (running Brian Suda’s excellent X2V transform) to add all the contacts from that page to my address book (by simply typing in the feeds. etc. URL before the current URL in the URL field in the browser and pressing return)

http://feeds.technorati.com/contact/http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html

Followed by subscribing to the day’s events from that page to my calendar:

webcal://feeds.technorati.com/event/http://www.w3.org/2006/03/01-TechPlenAgenda.html

Thanks to Robert Bachmann with help marking up the hCards and hCalendar events of that page, Dan Connolly for checking the page in, to Brian Suda for fixing some last minute bugs in X2V, and to Ryan King for swiftly updating the Technorati Events and Contacts Feed service. They did an awesome job and everything worked flawlessly.

Tags: