Year: 2006

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!

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Master Foo’s Taxation Theory of Microformats

Sean McGrath has written an entertaining, enlightening piece, musing about the economic arguments for microformats. Go read Master Foo’s Taxation Theory of Microformats, but first, a preview:

“History has shown that the only way to reduce information processing complexity to zero is for applications on the value chain to have build-it knowledge of the information formats they work with. XML, RDF, UML and so on are not formats so much as meta-formats. Consequently, built-in knowledge of any of these does not amount to zero complexity. XML is not a file format. It is a file format for file formats. This distinction is all important when calculating complexity.

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.

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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.

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Speakers:

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