Alex Barnett's blog : Mix06

Moving my blog

alexbarn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 21:38:00 GMT

OK, so I moved my new Alex Barnett blog to here for a number of reasons, explained here at my, er, new blog.

Wiring the Web (the video)

alexbarn — Fri, 05 May 2006 01:16:00 GMT

Matt Augustine and Paresh Suthar presented the Live Clipboard / RSS SSE (and microformats) work at Microsoft Mix06 last month.

Was a great session - you can watch the video now.

Tags: RSS microformats

RSS, microformats, Live Clipboards and Screencasts

alexbarn — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 04:59:00 GMT

Some great posting going on re: microformats / RSS / Live Clipboard.

First to point out is Ray Ozzie's update (posted April 1st, but no jokes...) on some of the discussions taking place since the Live Clipboards announcement. Links to more resources too.

Nice to see Ray also acknowledging the work Tantek is doing to push microformats - a key component in the Live Clipboard concept demos shown at Mix06 and EmTech last month. (Tantek was one of the guests on Friday's microformats podcast).

The next related post is another classy screencast by Jon Udell identifying the data mapping challenge, using the Live Clipboards example.

"All this leads up to a question: How can I copy an event from one of these services and paste it into another? My conclusion is that adopting Live Clipboard and microformats will be necessary but not sufficient. We'll also need a way to agree that, for example, this venue is the same as that venue. At the end, I float an idea about how we might work toward such agreements."

The last but not least post to highlight is Danny Ayers' thinking about the problem Jon identifies.

"For Jon's event scenario, I think using direct URIs is probably easiest for identification. In part because for things like this a sameAs mapping is probably going to be pretty easy to discover. I put Jon's work homepage into Technorati's search, chances are it'll spit out his blog URI too. "

Find out more about microformats:

microformats community and wiki
join the microformats mailing lists

My microformats posts

Tags: microformats, semantic-web, technology, web, web 2.0

Microformats Podcast

alexbarn — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 06:59:00 GMT

Microformats Podcast

Here's a great podcast for you. All about microformats...

Joining me are Tantek Çelik, Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare. I think it's safe to say these guys know a thing or two about the web and microformats.

As usual, show notes and link to download below.

Enjoy.

Background

Last week I met with Tantek Çelik and the Mix06 event in Las Vegas where he, Marc Canter and Joshua Allen organized a Structured Blogging and Microformats 'birds of a feather' non-official event after the main sessions were over.

Tantek and I met up the next day and agreed we should get a podcast together on the topic of microformats. I asked him to invite a couple of others along for the call and he arranged for Dan Connolly and Rohit Khare to were kind enough to join us, two people who have also been intimately involved with the development of this exciting new area of microformats.

The Guests

Tantek Çelik is CTO at Technorati. Prior to his current role, Tantek was representative to the W3C for Microsoft where he also helped lead the development of Internet Explorer for Macintosh. He also spent four year at Apple and has been instrumental (along with others) in making microformats what is today.

Dan Connolly is Technical Staff at W3C, where he edited the HTML 2.0 specification with Tim Berners-Lee, was chair of the W3C Working Group that produced HTML 3.2 and HTML 4.0 and collaborated with Jon Bosak to form the W3C XML Working Group and produce the W3C XML 1.0 Recommendation. Dan is also very involved with the W3C's Semantic Web initiatives (RDF, OWL and SPARQL). Dan blogs too.

Rohit Khare is Director of CommerceNet Labs, a non-profit investigating and promoting decentralized electronic commerce. Rohit started KnowNow in 2000 after working at the W3C during the 90's and is today working with the microformats folks as part of his work at CommereNet Labs.

Huge thanks to Tantek, Dan and Rohit for their time.

So, on to the podcast (under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License)...

Download

Microformats Podcast - (51 mins, .mp3, 12mb)

Show Notes

Introduction
What are microformats and history? (5:30)
The 'we' in microformats: microformats community, wiki, mailing lists (10:30)
Why bother? What's in it for whom? What do we have to gain with microformats? (13:30)
- Less effort, more benefits
Scenarios - the soccer season (21:00)
The schema design philosophy - Microformats are based on real world examples (26:50)
The evolution of microformats (30:00)
- If there a hundred microformats, something has gone wrong
- Widely adopted Link microformats: (rel tag).
- Compound microformats: hCard implementations (sharing contact info) and hCalendar implementations (sharing schedules)
- Experimentation - Remixed microformats: hReview and Listing examples
- Making the simple things easy
Interop with other formats (34:00)
Ray Ozzie's Live Clipboard demo (screencasts) and microformats - the cut and paste (semantic) web (37:00)
- Microformats-REST
- Pasting 'live' and RSS-enabled network pipe system
- Tantek's Updates - Live syndication and packaging of data formats
Getting the semantic web. What does it mean? What does it enable? (46:00)
- Microformats - an onramp onto the semantic web future
Final thoughts (48:30)
End (51:00)

Find out more about microformats:

microformats community and wiki
join the microformats mailing lists

My podcast archive
My microformats posts

Tags: microformats, semantic-web, technology, web, web 2.0

RSS + SLE (real world) examples

alexbarn — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:05:00 GMT

Sean Lyndersay over on the IE team blog posted about the RSS Simple List Extensions (SLE) and how they are being used today.

(Note you need IE 7 to see the SLE functionality in-browser. Since not everyone will (or can) try out the IE7 beta, I've created some screenshots so you can see what all this is about.)

The first is Amazon's use. Here is Jeff Bezos' wishlist as an RSS feed with SLE.

Then there's eBay - this RSS+SLE feed provides filtering and sorting on a number of different categories:

Yahoo! Music has been experimenting too. Here is the Yahoo! Music Top 10 Songs list in RSS+SLE

More links including videos over at the IE7 team blog.

Tags: RSS SLE Microsoft Mix06 IE7

Mix06 - that's a wrap!

alexbarn — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:43:00 GMT

Here's some Mix06 day 2 and 3 pics, links and stuff...

Scott Guthrie's presentation went down well -

Wallace McClure liked the Atlas features he saw and met up with some Microsoft folks after the Atlas session.

eBay's Alan Lewis presented on using eBay Web Services to build a live.com gadget. He's built a gadget that searches through the eBay site and presents the results on the Live.com.

Met up with Nick Swann, over from the UK.

Shawn Morrissey (below) from the Windows Sidebar team was happy...the BBC showed off some of the very cool stuff they are doing with his product.

There was an unofficial microformats and structured blogging session at the end of the second day run by Marc Canter and Tantek.

It was fun. That conversation is ongoing.

Here's a video of the Bill Gates and Tim O'Reilly chat on day 1....

Those O'Reilly boys are everywhere...here's Jeff Pepper and John Osborn from O'Reilly Media:

Jeff Barr did a couple of Amazon sessions. One was on the Mechanical Turk service (I'm still blown away at how cool this idea is) and the other was on the Alexa search engine. Jeff was interviewed by a film crew at event, you can see the video here.

Talking of video, Kevin Briody wonders whether providing so much event content online might have the long term affect of reducing the value in attending these events inperson. He points to a post by TDavid who did a great job in covering a whole bunch of Mix06 stuff who argues that one can safely stay at home and get all the information they need via the web. My view on this it that this has been happening for years since the internet arrived. The effect the web is having to event format design is that events are having to maximse the value of actually being there rather than virtually following the event online. For example - the question and answer sections of event sessions are taking up more and more of the presentation time . If fact, the Q & A is increasingly becoming the event. To risk upsetting those who hate the overuse of certain phraseology, these types of events are becoming more like conversations and less like lectures. That's a good thing. It's going to be some years yet before VR tech gets to the point that allows you to have lunch with the IE team. In the meantime, there's Virtual Mix.

Other stuff I attended and enjoyed included the Spark recap session, the Identity Crisis / Identity Metasystem session hosted by Kim Cameron and the Windows RSS platform overview where Newsgator's CEO Greg Reinacker showed how their syncing across clients and devices uses the RSS feed store.

I thought the lounge areas were cool.

Dinner last night with Dion and his girlfriend was fun too:

Marc made a cameo appearance:

Tags: Mix06 Microsoft RSS microformats

Mix06 Day 1

alexbarn — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:59:00 GMT

I've uploaded a bunch of my Mix06 pics. My favourite is this one of Marc Canter advertising his microformats and structured blogging session he is running later today.

Yesterday Marc asked Bill Gates a question around open APIs. I think he liked the answer.

Dwain Silverman has some links to Mix06 posts and gada.be has a bunch of search results too.

Tags: Mix06 Microsoft

New IE7 build ready for download

alexbarn — Tue, 21 Mar 2006 01:06:00 GMT

I'm at Mix06. Here's a quick hit - from the IE team: 'New IE7 Build Available at Mix06'

"It is build 5335.5 and it is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/ie7/. This build is for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and shows the current state of IE7."

Mix06 - here I come....!

alexbarn — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 18:22:00 GMT

I'm heading off to Mix06 tomorrow. My first time to Las Vegas...

Other Microsoft attendees have started making their way down too: PeteL, Visual Web Developer Design View Tester; Cyra Richardson, Program Manager at IE; 'Vibro' Architect Evangelist and the Keith Smith form the ASP.NET team.

Lots of cool sessions planned there this week by some very interesting speakers.

I'll be staying at The Venetion (here's a bird's eye view).

If you're going at want to meet up, let me know!

Tags: M ix06, Microsoft