Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

Microformats are:

• A way of thinking about data
• Design principles for formats
• Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns (“Pave the cow paths.”)
• Highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
• A set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
• “An evolutionary revolution”
• All the above.

Microformats are not:

• A new language
• Infinitely extensible and open-ended
• An attempt to get everyone to change their behavior and rewrite their tools
• A whole new approach that throws away what already works today
• A panacea for all taxonomies, ontologies, and other such abstractions
• Defining the whole world, or even just boiling the ocean
• Any of the above

The microformats principles

• Solve a specific problem
• Start as simple as possible
• Design for humans first, machines second
• Reuse building blocks from widely adopted standards
• Modularity / embeddability
• Enable and encourage decentralized development, content, services

See the wiki for more detail.

In May of this year I wrote about the problems of URLs for a given Twitter user’s profile, or for an individual post or “status” being different, depending the Twitter client in use. I suggested a new protocol for Twitter links. [You might want to read that, before the rest of this post]. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this simpler solution sooner!

The answer (in the short term) is to use a microformat (or a microformat-like “poshsformat”, if you prefer to call it that) for each case. Let’s say we use the classes twitter-user & twitter-status.

User-agents (that’s jargon for browsers) could then employ a script (such as those used by GreaseMonkey, or a Firefox extension) to ignore the encoded URL and substitute the equivalent for the user’s preferred Twitter client instead.

For links to user profiles:

<a
href="http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett
</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-user"
href= "http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett
</a>

and:

<a
href="http://accessibletwitter.com/app/user.php?uid=pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-user"
href=" http://accessibletwitter.com/app/user.php?uid=pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett</a>

Likewise, for individual statuses:

<a
href="twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/1828036334">
something witty</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-status"
href="twitter.com/pigsonthewing/status/1828036334">
something wittyg<a>

and:

<a
href="accessibletwitter.com/app/status.php?1828036334">
something witty<a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-status"
href="accessibletwitter.com/app/status.php?1828036334">
something witty<a>

and:

<a
href="m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334"
something witty</a>

would become:

<a
class="twitter-status"
href="m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334">
something witty</a>

To simplify matters, the rules for extracting the user ID or the status update could be the same in both cases:

1. Parse the value of the href attribute of the element to which the class applies.
2. If there is a question mark, use everything after that.
3. Otherwise, if there is an equals sign, use everything after that.
4. Otherwise, use everything after the last slash.

That would deal with all the examples in my earlier post.

So, if you’re using a user-agent which is aware of this microformat, and find on a page:

<a
class="twitter-user"
href="http://twitter.com/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett<a>
said
<a
class="twitter-status"
href="m.slandr.net/single.php?id=1828036334">
something witty<a>

but your preferred Twitter client is Dabr (one I recommend, BTW!) then your browser would treat (and possibly render) that as:

<a
href="dabr.co.uk/user/pigsonthewing">
Andy Mabbett<a>
said
<a
class="twitter-status"
href="dabr.co.uk/status/1828036334">
something witty<a>

Simples!

NESTA Reboot Britain hightlights

Paul Hodgkin of Patient Opinion’s NESTA essay: How the new economics of voice will change the NHS bit.ly

Howard Rheingold: 21st century literacies 40 min vid blip.tv JD Lasica’s 6 min vid interview : bit.ly

Digital Britain

Stephen Carter: on OFCOM, Cameron, quangos bit.ly

Universities, future of

Stephen Downes has all the links about Demos Edgeless University report bit.ly

News microformat

AP, Media Standards Trust propose news microformat bit.ly

Regional News

Write To Reply consultation on future of regional news: read the document, comment and vote bit.ly

Birmingham Post to cease daily publication? is.gd

Talk About Local

Birmingham news feed pipe features at Hyperlocal labs talkaboutlocal.org

News of the World phone hack allegations

Out-law: Police may have had a duty to notify phone-hacking victims, says privacy expert www.out-law.com

Nick Davies: News of the World phone hacking www.guardian.co.uk

There’s a new browser on the block, Internet Explorer 8. I’ve been obsessing recently about microformats, so I was intrigued by its “Web Slice” functionality. To test this out I wrapped my Currently Reading widget in a slice. I changed “Currently Reading” to “Current Input,” since I didn’t have a quick way to change the id of the h2 tag on that text … I’ll add a “Currently Listening To” slice later to test multiple slices.

I’ve tested this with IE8 and I’ll test in Firefox with WebChunks later. I’d love input or questions on this experiment

I figured this was as good a time as any to test the hCalendar microformat.

I recently made Betterdot’s Contact Us page both human and machine readable by adding hCard microformat markup to the underlying XHTML.  This notion of “machine readable” content is arguably abstract and somewhat obscure however.  What do we mean?  What do machines see?  Perhaps a picture (or three) are worth the proverbial 1,000 words.

When a human reader, using a web browser, looks at the page, he or she sees this:

Contact page, as seen by human readers

Without semantic markups such as the hCard microformat markup, a machine (for example a Google bot crawling the Betterdot site for indexing) sees this:

Contact page as seen by machines (no microformat markup)

With semantic markups such as the hCard microformat markup, the same machine or bot sees this:

Contact page, as seen by machines with microformat markup

In Layman’s terms, microformats help machine “read” data marked up with microformat tags on the page.   While “reading” falls short of true semantic “understanding”, microformats are certainly a step in the right direction.

Every week I read tens of thousands of blog posts. Here, for your weekend enjoyment, are some highlights from my recent reading, for you.

	On Starting Up… http://www.markpeterdavis.com/getventure/2009/01/the-4-types-of-exits-secondary.html Exiting via a secondary transaction to bolster liquidity.
	On Design & Product Experience… http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1545-how-we-reduced-chargebacks-by-30-as-a-percentage-of-sales  On the usability of billing.
	On Modular Innovation… http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/01/26/how-mosembro-uses-microformats-to-improve-usability/ A look at the Modular Innovation and microformats of Mosembro.

Have a great weekend!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

Add to Social Bookmarks:

It’s the time of the year when we see the predictions for technology developments for the coming year. Michael Stephens at Tame the Web has published his Top Ten Trends and Technologies for 2009, and has made it easy for us to to get hooked on his discussion by being able to  Download a PDF of the post here.

The ten on the list are:

1. The Ubiquity of the cloud
2. The Changing Role of IT
3. The Value of the Commons
4. The promise of micro-interaction
5. The Care & Nurturing of the Tribe
6. The triumph of the portable device
7. The importance of Personalization
8. The impact of Localization
9. The evolution of the Digital Lifestyle
10. The shift toward Open Thinking

There are many themes running through these trends and technologies,  but you can’t go past the shift in devices, the power of the cloud, and the importance of the digital shifts that mean that the environment and information services of school libraries have a big challenge ahead of them.

Kathryn Greenhill at Librarians Matter alerts us to Top Tech Trends for ALA midwinter.

My favourites are:

• Linked data is a new name for the Semantic Web – The Semantic Web is about creating conceptual relationships between things found on the Internet. Believe it or not, the idea is akin to the ultimate purpose of a traditional library card catalog. Have an item in hand. Give it a unique identifier. Systematically describe it. Put all the descriptions in one place and allow people to navigate the space. By following the tracings it is possible to move from one manifestation of an idea to another ultimately providing the means to the discovery, combination, and creation of new ideas. The Semantic Web is almost the exactly the same thing except the “cards” are manifested using RDF/XML on computers through the Internet.
• Blogging is peaking – There is no doubt about it. The Blogosphere is here to stay, yet people have discovered that it is not very easy to maintain a blog for the long haul. The technology has made it easier to compose and distribute one’s ideas, much to the chagrin of newspaper publishers. On the other hand, the really hard work is coming up with meaningful things to say on a regular basis.
• Word/tag clouds abound – It seems very fashionable to create word/tag clouds now-a-days. When you get right down to it, word/tag clouds are a whole lot like concordances — one of the first types of indexes. Each word (or tag) in a document is itemized and counted. Stop words are removed, and the results are sorted either alphabetically or numerically by count.

The Semantic Web is really struggling to emerge, but I believe it will happen.

Tim Berners-Lee had a vision for the internet, believing that the Semantic Web would be able to assist the evolution of human knowledge as a whole.

Human endeavor is caught in an eternal tension between the effectiveness of small groups acting independently and the need to mesh with the wider community. The Semantic Web, in naming every concept simply by a URI, lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. This structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.

Roy Tennant considered this vision, writing about the Promises of the Semantic Web, and the state of Linked Data systems, programming and data structures that need to emerge to provide the kind of Semantic Web that Tim Berners Lee envisioned.

Folksonomy and tagging are very useful, but they are not the Semantic Web – not in the way Tim Berner-Lee imagined.  All we are doing is aggregating our information (and our collective intelligence), but we are doing so idiosyncratically.  Without standards, we have erratic compilations. The onotology of our data structures are the challenge – if the data strings don’t match, then the inferences won’t hold across data sets for the meanings of the content being expressed.  There is great wisdom in the clouds, but there is no precision without accuracy!  Somehow the Semantic Web will eventually be able to utilise machine languages to snap ‘meaning’  to a grid of structured data.

Read the Future of MicroFormats and Semantic Technologies.  You can’t escape metadata, and you have to rely on markup languages.

The future of microformats is bright, by making it simple to encode your data, there is no reason not too. Tackling very common facets of the web, such as; people, places and events, microformats have helped to break the chicken and the egg issue. “Why should I mark-up my data if no one else is?” or “I’m not going to mark-up my data if there are no tools to extract it”.

Luckily the menagerie of tools is copious and being extended everyday. But I must admit I didn’t know that Firefox has the Operator toolbar which can detect and act on any information found in the page. Operator requires information on the Web to be encoded using microformats, and since this method for semantically encoding information is relatively new, not all sites are using microformats yet. However, Operator works great with any blog that uses rel-tag, and the sites Yahoo! Local, Flickr, and Upcoming.org, all of which contain millions of pieces of information expressed using microformats. As more sites begin to semantically encode data with microformats, Operator will automatically work with them as well.

Right!  School libraries?  Where are you in the discussion of these issues?  I have a lot to learn!

‘Low level’ semantic systems are easy to understand.  Today I noticed the ’semantic’ support available in Feedly – my RSS reader.

The Reuters Open Calais service  “is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application”. Apparently Calais “doesn’t just make data searcheable, it makes knowledge searchable”.

Short introduction: few thoughts back on this crazy 2008 plus some interesting discussions recently gave me the idea to use my blog to talk more about people. Like some friends I’m lucky to have. Or just people I wanna talk about. Not usual for me but…

I met Christophe Ducamp at the very beginning of Open Coffee in Paris. 2006 maybe. I knew him first because of it’s reputation. He was co-author of “Les Blogs” (M2 Editions), and a sort of web expert. He’s much more than that!

I’m always smiling when he says “I’m not a coder”. Ok but this guy can write this.

Funny thing with Christophe is that he is known not only in France, but also the US for example, we discovered that when we traveled for the 1st Trade Mission Tour (aka GeekTrip#1). A big emotion when he met Steve Ganz from Linkedin, after a translation in French he made from one of Steve’s interview.

Even if you’re going to 6Apart, or Google, there would be one guy that know Christophe. Including the big guy from Seesmic! If you have checked the previous link about Steve Ganz’s interview, another interesting thing to understand from Christophe: on his website it’s said “This is my private work space. Feel free to participate”. A good summary! I love that!

If you want to see more of his translations in French, go there.

Since all his investment and work on Internet, always with understanding, his main focus are now microformats, OpenID (he’s the French representative), semantic (here explanations regarding Twine, a semantic website), hCards. Click on some link to know more about, or just listen to this video made by Henri Kaufman (in French).

Christophe knows perfectly how to describe clearly those complex concept.

A big guy, I tell you. Really impatient to see more of his projects for 2009!

Микроформаты (иногда сокращается до μF или uF) — часть языка разметки, которая позволяет помечать семантику в веб-страницах на HTML или XHTML. Программы могут извлекать данные из веб страниц, которые помечены одним или несколькими микроформатами.

Добавление микроформатов к обычной веб-странице позволит компьютерам обрабатывать HTML-текст и загружать информацию в базы данных. Например, поисковые роботы смогут находить контактную информацию, события и обзоры.

hCard (сокращение для HTML vCard) — микроформат для публикации контактной информации людей, компаний, организаций и мест в (X)HTML, Atom, RSS или произвольном XML. hCard является представлением 1 в 1 параметров и значений формата vCard (RFC 2426).

http://rhizohm.net/contact.html

На этой странице реализована hCard карточка. А так же встроен очень симпатичный обработчик этой карточки Oomph.

Tails Export 0.3.5 (2008-06-30) Robert de Bruin

vCard, vEvent, xFolk, hReview, rel-license, XMDP 등 Microformat을 지원하는 파이어폭스 부가 기능.

vCard와 vEvent는 내보내기(Export) 할 수 있다. (Mac OS X 기본 설정은 주소록과 iCal)

부족한 점도 많지만 드디어 일반 사용자가 비교적 쉽게 사용할 만한 소프트웨어가 나왔다는 느낌이 든다.

I keep reading lately about Supper Influencer and others with a vast online presence in the context of leadership. I agree that these figures are helping us adapt to the new power that lies in social media. Yet, I think that we need to put things in perspective.  Just because they have 4,000 followers on Twitter and a great blog doesn’t mean that they have enabled millions to do things they couldn’t do before. In other words: they haven’t necessarily led us to a new world online. But here are the six true leaders of the new web world in my opinion, because they have helped to shape this new world. 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

The World Wide Web inventor, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and more. Sir Tim is my first choice for a true leader of the new web world not just because of his past contributions, but also for his vision of the way information will be linked going forward. In his Giant Global Graph blog post, he speaks about making the web smarter using standard semantic formats like FOAF, RDF, OWL and SPARQL.

“It’s not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important.”

We can already see the benefit of using these semantic annotations in web pages that support microforamts. One example is HCard in Google Maps:

“By marking up our results with the hCard microformat, your browser can easily recognize the address and contact information in the page, and help you transfer it to an address book or phone more easily.”

I don’t know how much (if at all) Sir Tim is using Twitter, but in my opinion he is a true technology leader. The standards that the W3C organization is setting keep changing our lives.

Dave Winer

The man that gave us RSS, podcasting, and taught us what blogging is all about.From his blog post The unedited voice of a person about blogging:”If it was one voice, unedited, not determined by group-think — then it was a blog, no matter what form it took. If it was the result of group-think, with lots of ass-covering and offense avoiding, then it’s not. Things like spelling and grammatic errors were okay, in fact they helped convince one that it was unedited.”I don’t know what Mr. Winer is up to these days but in my opinion his contribution to the weblog world helps to empower millions in sharing their lives, knowledge, and thoughts online.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon.com

What Amazon is doing in recent years for small businesses is what that Microsoft did in the 80’s and 90’s.

“Amazon Web Services(AWS) enables web-scale computing by providing access to an established infrastructure that gives you flexibility to run your business at “web-scale” — uninhibited by growth and demand. In other word it saves a new online business from building the costly scalable infrastructure to support it. The fee structure is also a big advantage with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) your initial cost is minimal and it only grows with your business success. “

The results:

“A growing community of 330,000+ developers, start-ups, and established companies are building robust applications using AWS solutions.”

One of my favorite quotes came from the My Other Computer is a Data Center sticker story. If Microsoft is now building tools for cloud computing then people will follow. You can also see what Mr. Bezos has to say about AWS here.

I know that Amazon is a business but when I see a company that shares infrastructure originally built to serve its own business with others who otherwise couldn’t afford to build it, and thereby enable new businesses to emerge,  I see a leader.If the direction of web app development is into the clouds, Amazon was the pioneer and will be the leader taking us there.

Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia

Wikipedia founder. Can you imagine a day without visiting this web site for learning a new technology, buzz word, persona, or millions of other terms? My Wikipedia sequence starts with Google-ing a term, finding the right Wikipedia page on the Google search results list, then clicking. After a few minutes I’m in the know. Based on the fact that Wikipedia always is on top of Google SERP I can only guess that I’m not the only one dancing this little dance. I can’t thank you enough, Mr. Wales.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Google

It seems lately that Google is becoming the next Microsoft: big, ubiquitous, too powerful, some may even say a monopoly. I agree with some of these claims, and I like to see any of the Alts taking market share away from Google. Yet can you see any other company today that knows how to treat data the way Google does? Can you see any other software company that does such an amazing job in building product usability?  Sometimes I think that Google is inside my head predicting the next move.  Recently Google launched Chrome, a new web browser that shows again how this company leads. The web world of today is not the same as it was few years ago. Web applications nowadays offer no less functionality than desktop applications running on our personal computer. It was a time for a new browser and Google was the one building it. I’m sure now that Google, using Chrome, and having access to our desktop will lead us to an even more organized world of information.

The people on this list have a lot in common. They are superb engineers and business people. They are not new leaders actually–they led us before–but they are not about to stop. They built technology that enables so many of us to do things that could only have been done before by large organizations, if at all. They understand the digital world and adapt to changes faster than anyone else. Unless they happen to be the very ones that catalyze the change themselves.

Do you agree? Did I miss others (probably)? What other forms of leadership on the web do you see today?

I still have a lot to learn about semantic search engines and the semantic web but I have few early observations about its direction.

I belive that Semantic search engines will do a lot of work in the back-end to help people with simple queries to find deep meanings.

I don’t see my dad going online and typing something like “where did US president’s kids went to school?”. Not because of the remote subject but because of the complexity. Most people type one or two words the most inside the search edit box. Maybe in the future he will ask such question using his own voice (see Nuance).

So, my assumption is that semantic search engines have different roles:

• In the front-end
  • Research – A tool to to find patterns, trends and sets.  This tool should provide multiple visual ways to present the results (map, heat map, timeline, bubbles, tag cloud, 3D). Use case: I want to expose these and show them to the world in a clear visual way (example). I like to present them on my blog or web site (iFrame/Widget it). This is a great tool for researchers, news reporter, and bloggers.  TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and others do present such data on their blog periodically – example. Again, this is not for the average user. 
  • Time saving: Operator is a Firefox extension that adds the ability to interact with semantic data on web pages, including Microformat, RDFa and eRDF.  You can use it to extract and export contact from a web page to your contact list, and event information to your calendar. It is still hard to find sites that supports microformats today (examples that do: Technorati – search page results, Google Map, LinkedIn – contact) but maybe Dapper will change this. You can now take an HTML page and automate adding microformats classes using this tool – let the tool find recurring elements in the origin page. Dapper does the “semantic work” for you. For more about this tasks see this smartly titled blog post: Does Tim Burners Lee’s Blog support Microformats? By the way Operator is a great way to check which web-sites supports microformats (use the Operator sidebar: from Firefox menu bar choose View->Sidebar->Operator).
• As a back-end operation
  • Organize – I want my data to be linked using semantic techniques – see Twine .
  • Recommendation (discovery and sharing) – based on mining my data (and others) what you can tell me that: I don’t know that I don’t know.
  • Time saving: people have trouble with tags. In my opinion, the main reason is that it is hard to come up with forward thinking useful tags that will help to find data later, to match other tags and to help search engines to drive more traffic to the article. I can spend few good minutes thinking, should I tag it as: social network, social networks, or social-network. So, automating this process will help in many ways: more tagging, quicker tagging, more common tagging=more links and association. Twine today suggests tags that I can pick from, yet I think that this is just the beginnings. 
  • Money – in a way Google does this in AdSense – matching content, and target readers with ads. If you manage to do better job in this area there is a great potential. There are more places to add ads: people profile pages (not just in Facebook – I have a ton of profile pages across many social services, sigh), maybe in comments. 
  • Passive search – Alerts – at this point Google allow you to set alerts for keywords and Delicious for Tags. This is another way (as Chris Brogan says) to listen to the web. Maybe there is a way to improve exact keyword matching with associated content – same as semantic recommendation engines works. This could be also useful to organize the alerts results – I get alerts about some keywords in one long list. I’m not sure how many people are using alerts but I think that this is a great tool. This is by the way another marketing channel  – if I’m telling you what I’m looking for why don’t you “help me find it”? Alerts can become more sophisticated looking for patterns – example: more than 10 mentions of a word/phrase/product/company/my competitor in a day/week/month. I know that you can check that today on Google Trends but only for high volume terms, and it is not set as Alert – if you don’t look for it, it will not come to you.

Finally. Google today does a lot of “Microformat work” and some semantic discovery too, all behind the scene. You don’t ask for it explicitly but Google will still going to deliver it. When you search for ReadWriteWeb for example you’ll get along with the site link also the Contact, About, and Products information. If you’ll search for “movie near Lexington, MA” you’ll get what you need. This is too, support my assumption that you’ll not going to see sophisticated queries submitted by most people but the semantic web will be able to come up with better and more relevant answers to simple queries with complex meanings.

I was speaking to Magnus last night and he was asking if I had a W3C cheat sheet. While I do have a couple of cheat sheets for things like Script.aculo.us and Regular Expressions, I thought a W3C cheat would be a good addition, so I set out along the path of Google. It wasn’t long before I’d stumbled across several other useful cheat sheets – no substitute for knowing your stuff, of course – but handy as a quick reminder…

• Regular expressions cheat sheet
• CSS cheat sheet
• Javascript cheat sheet
• Script.aculo.us cheat sheet
• Prototype cheat sheet
• Microformats cheat sheet
• SEO cheat sheet
• A very useful accessibility checklist
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) cheatsheet

Don’t see a cheatsheet you’re looking for? Try here, there are lots more…

Firstly I’m not using WordPress’ Press This feature any more, this is the third time I am having to post this after it ate 2 previous drafts. Maybe I should fix the GreaseMonkey script I build for /. to work on Press This.

After predicting the death of MySpace they have surprised me by adding an OpenID Identity Provider. Obviously they are only allowing you to use it to authenticate on other sites, but still is a step with others including FaceBook haven’t done yet. So I started to muse how FaceBook would be able to top it, and what I actually want from a OpenID Identity Provider:

• Authentication (obviously)
• FOAF
• hCard (or other microformats)
• Certificate Authentication (PKI)

ClaimID already has 3 of the 4, but their friend system requires some kind of social networking and as it is not a social networking site it doesn’t really cover FOAF completely. This is why integration of FOAF would be a good step for both FaceBook and MySpace.

MySpace is only acting as an identity provider, meaning that while you can use your MySpace credentials to sign into other Web sites, you cannot yet use your credentials from another OpenID provider to sign into MySpace.

Source: MySpace Opens Up First; Launches Data Availability on Flixster and Eventful

technorati tags: authentication, foaf, hcard, identity, microformat, openid, security

With some inspiration from the official microformats icons, I was able to create a polyphasic sleep microformat icon using Inkscape. Get the complete Inkscape project svg here.

I think I’ll call it the Zzz format for use when logging polyphasic naps. Next up, develop the specs.

- Adventures in Polyphasic Sleeping

CalendarSwamp is one of my favorite blogs, and a recent post about handling duplicate events made me wonder about using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI’s) to track an event. If microformats like hCal supported some sort of unique identifier built on URI’s, then if you see two events that are slightly different, but share a URI, then you know where to go for the canonical information.

HighTechCville is starting to grow enough that we will have duplicate events listed, and if we pull in an event from a feed, and it’s later updated, say the date changed, then it’s a challenge to figure out which differences to update your data from.

I strongly disagree with Scott’s comment that maybe Yahoo or Eventful or Facebook be THE registry of events:

Eventful has more than 7 million future events in its database. If Eventful opened that up in a special way that’s queryable by anybody, Eventful could issue a unique identifier. Yahoo’s Max Engel, who was also at this session, notes that Digg already checks for duplication of news postings. Maybe Eventful could do the same thing for events.

I think any system that is based on centralized registries is doomed to failure, and instead we need to support having multiple sources of data, ie use URI’s. However, if Eventful is one among many data providers providing a unique identifier that is a URI, then more power to them!

My take on multiple sources of data, with URI’s pointing to the source, means that people can make a decision on who they trust for the real “canonical” data. A single event, say an opera show may be listed on multiple services, so you might trust the URI that points to the Seattle Opera’s homepage the most, followed by maybe a pointer to Eventful’s record of the opera show.

And I think hCal is the right way of communicating this data around. While hCal is just really getting traction (along with the other microformats) I still think they will be THE way of tying User Generated Content together in the future.

I talked about Microformats in a post last year on web20expo. It appears that the technology is now going main stream. I attended a workshop on Web2.0 Best Practices
at the Web20 Expo this week in which the speaker, Niall Kennedy
expounded on th advantages of using microformats. He said he’s seen a
significant growth in traffic on his site since he started doing so since search engine results show direct links to pages on his site.
Yahoo is adding microformats to many of their properties. The yahoo event site
already has them. This is exciting since microformats are a bridge to
the semantic web, which we’ve been talking about for several years now.
However, the talk has never seemed to materialize into anything
concrete. Meanwhile, the web2.0 world has decided to do things their
own way.

A classic example is tagging. While the semantic
folks talk about taxonomies and ontologies, the web guys invented
folksonomies (aka tagging). Tagging has allowed users and sites to
group stuff together, attaching semantic meaning to their data. Tag
clouds have worked fairly well and sites like flickr are extending the
concept by automatically creating even more tags ! The problem with
tags of course is that a word can have several meanings and it’s not
easy to figure out which exact interpretation should be used. This
problem is what RDF solves nicely, but more on that later.

Microformats
are better than tags in the sense that they have a more rigid format
and as such provide better semantics, although not perfect. Let’s look
at an example:

<div class="vevent"><br>  <span class="summary">JavaOne Conference</span>: <br>  <span class="description">The premier java conference</span><br>  <p><a class="url"><a href="http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf">http://java.sun.com/javaone/sf</a><br>  <p><abbr class="dtstart" title="2008-05-06">May 6</abbr>-<br>  <abbr class="dtend" title="2008-05-09">9</abbr>,<br> at the <span class="location">Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA</span><br> </div>

which will display as :

The
advantage of such a format is that it clearly specifies various
properties associated with the event: summary, description, url, start
and end dates, location etc. However, it can still be ambiguous since
it uses literals for many properites e.g. the location. If someone
specified the location simply as “San Francisco”, it could mean any of
27 different San Francisco’s.

If we take this formalizing a step further, we reach the world of RDF.
Here every entry is specified as a tuple of the form:
<subject><predicate><object> using URIs to represent
the objects in an unambiguous manner. Without going into the syntactic
details, we could specify a location to be defined in the standard
format of: number, street, city, state, country, zip. This provides an
object with identity, the property that uniquely identifies it.

I’ll talk more about RDF and semantic web in another post.