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 contact cards. We’ve got events. 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.