Month: June 2006

Thanks for a wonderful Birthday Party!

Thanks once again for all your help in pulling together a smashing public celebration of the first year of Microformats.org — in less than a week!

Based on the drink ticket and badge counts (and dozens of photos on flickr), between 125-150 participants joined us to kick off a very successful week for the microformats community at MashPit, Wharton West, Supernova, and BarCamp. We saw at least two major announcements: Y! Local adding 10M+ hCards and hReviews, and ~500K hListings from Edgeio.

t-shirt modeling in an elevator by Rohit and Tantek

Another sign of our momentum was raising $5,250 in sponsorship on such short notice. The proceeds went towards several event costs, subsidizing T-shirts, and reserves for the future — stay tuned for a reissue of the classic wallet magnifier cards…

While Tantek and Chris deserve all credit for initiating the event and soliciting sponsors; and both Ryan King and Tara Hunt helped immensely on the spot, I cannot say enough about how effective Sonya Schaefer (CommerceNet’s interim marketing leader) was in making this actually happen.

micro-dessert buffet

She scrambled to scout out a venue, negotiated down the fee from thousands to free, made sure there was entertainment and flowers, and easily halved our catering budget by purchasing, transporting, presenting, and decorating our “micro-food” dessert buffet herself! I was out of town much of that week, so I can testify that it simply would not have come together as professionally as it did without her.

Thanks again to all of you, all of our sponsors, and most of all, our supporters, advocates, and developers — the microformats.org community that’s going to lead one of the most dramatic technology adoption ramps on the Web since blogging!

Lead Sponsor:
Microsoft
Sponsors:
CommerceNet, Technorati, Yahoo!
Supporters:
Automattic, Citizen Agency, Supernova

Yahoo Local Supports Microformats

Yahoo Local has announced that they’re now publishing their data in microformats. Included are hCards, hCalendars and hReviews.

I’m not sure how many instances of data this is, but its likely in the millions. Add that to hundreds of thousands of events on Upcoming.org, thousands of reviews on Yahoo! Tech and millions of hCards on Flickr profiles and Yahoo! is easily the largest support of microformats today.

Get a Microformats T-shirt

If you’re coming to tomorrow night’s party and would like one of the ever-popular Microformats t-shirts, we’ll have a table setup to sell them (cheap, I promise!).

Of course, we know you can’t all make it to the party here in San Francisco (but you’d come if you were nearby, right?), so if you want to get your hands on a shirt, Chris Messina, who’s done tons of work as a Microformateer, has put the shirts up for sale.

Go get yourself one, then post some photos to flickr.

Microformats Search

For many of you this is old news, but I just wanted to make sure everything’s seen it…

The week before last, we at Technorati launched an experimental Microformats Search tool in our “kitchen” (where you can taste the products before they’re fully “baked”).

This is an early stage release, but we wanted to get it out in the world for you to try.

In addition to the search tool, we’ve also started Pingerati.net, a ping system for microformated pages. We’re treating this as a community project, too, in which others can recieve the stream of pings for indexing. If you’d like to start recieving pings, just let us know!