Category: News

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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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.

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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.

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