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geotags as a microformat
hcards,
Microformats were born at SXSW four years ago and while they remain somewhat of a geek-only tool, judging by the packed house at the Growth and Evolution of Microformats panel, the communitiy's interest is piqued. By far the largest panel I've attended, moderator Tantek Çelik creator of Microformats kicking things off with a history of microformats through t-shirts. Using a number of different company promotional tees Çelik slowly hurmously stripped his way through the birth and history of microformats.
For those that aren't familiar with microformats, they are essentially just name spaces within html that tell machines how to handle information. The classic example is the hcard syntax which mirrors the common vcard syntax, but wraps it in HTML.
It might sound complicated and indeed describing microformats is often much harder than using them. In fact there's a good chance you already have some microformat data on the web. If you use popular sites like Flickr or Upcoming much of that data is in microformats.
But creating microformats isn't the point, the point is using them and to that end panel member Michael Kaply showed off his Firefox plugin, Operator, which makes it easy to use microformats. Once installed Operator auto-detects various microformats and can then do useful things with them. For instance all of the panel and event data on the SXSW site has microformat info on the page. Attendees with Operator (or similar) installed in their browser can auto add panelists contact info to their address book and send event schedules directly to Google or Yahoo calendar services.
Combine that with some SMS notification from your calendar services and you've discovered how the uber-geeks always knows what's happening and where.
Glenn Jones of Magdex then showed some web app prototypes that integrate microformats into social networking sites, including a way to aggregate online profiles and import then into a single repository. Unfortunately those tools aren't available yet, but anyone with numerous online profiles will probably appreiciate such services when they arrive.
Other highlights included a rundown of microformat search engines and a list of popular sites that are using microformats. As I mentioned above, if you're using Flickr you already have an hcard available for the world to use.
One demostration from a Technorati employee (unfortunately I didn't catch his name) showed how the Firefox plugin lkadsfj can be used to discover say and hcard with contact data and then send that data via bluetooth to your cellphone. sweet.
Microformats are unique in that usually when someone is creating a format or outlining code for something totally new whereas with microformats are dealing with information that already exists on the web, but could be organized better
Microformats search engines: edgeio uses hlisting to aggregate craig's list type of data.
Technorati kitchen:
Tantik said something that cuts to heart of why many geeks hate MySpace, the content is trapped at the URL there's no way to use that data across the web
hcard and openid openid2.0 may contain a way to exchange profiles and hopefully rather than reinventing the wheel, the openid folks will adopt vcard or hcard.
Microformats are actually quite simple to use, for instance here is mine.
GRDDL has come up twice now.
Eventful one of the early adoptors of microformats
Frances Berriman Volume
Michael Kaply IBM
Glenn Jones Creative Dir, Madgex
Tantek Çelik Chief Technologist, Technorati
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