Alex Barnett's blog : microformats

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.

If you like microformats and RSS you will love this.

alexbarn — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 02:04:00 GMT

If you like microformats and / or RSS you'll love it.

If you don't know about microformats and / or RSS you need to watch it.

Channel9 interviews Matt Augustine and Paresh Suthar about Live Clipboard and Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE).

Syndicated search engines broken - Part II

alexbarn — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 08:34:00 GMT

A few days ago I grumbled at the poor state of the search engines specializing in syndicated (RSS'd or Atomized) content.

Today, ~~Michael~~ Marshall Patrick is enthusiastically supporting a proposed standard by Bloglines that is trying to solve an apparent problem:

"“Everything you blog goes on your permanent record!” How many times have we heard that lately? From employment to family situations, many people have been frustrated to find out that things they intended to write for a personal audience is now discoverable by anyone in the world via search engines.

From the Bloglines proposal:

"As a result, we are proposing (and have implemented) an RSS and ATOM extension that allows publishers to indicate the distribution restrictions of a feed. Setting the access restriction to 'deny' will indicate the feed should not be re-distributed. In a nutshell, the proposal"

I respectfully disagree with ~~Michael's~~ Marshall's view here, and a user of these services, can not support the proposal, for three reasons:

1. Keeping stuff out of participating engines wouldn't ensure leakage. As one commenter on the quoted post has already pointed out (by '007') how do you avoid the repost scenario? If you really need to sneak stuff under the radar (to avoid getting fired???), use something other than public blogsite - you will be found. Another reason: why wouldn't some service providers show up that wouldn't adhere to the rules that ensure they catch the slime? (I could imagine 'Slimesearch'...). Private networks - ok = group IM, SSL'd, groups, etc (even company email considered leaky) - but just don't use inherently public networks for this kind of stuff.

2. A common issue with search results is spam. Spammers won't use the tag. I realize this isn't a stated goal of the proposal, but worth pointing out, I think.

3. IMHO, these guys (Bloglines, Technorati, etc) should be focussed on trying to solve the precisely reverse of the 'problem' they are trying to solve here with an access:restriction' tag - they should be trying to get more complete indexes, not the other way around.

Overall, this syndicated content search space is broken. The priorities seem wrong here - I don't see this step getting us any closer to getting better services when there are other much more fundamental issues that need solving.

microformats viewer

alexbarn — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 18:40:00 GMT

This is no ordinary blog post. It has embeded microformat content, but you won't see it.

This is the same page rendered in a 'microcontent viewer' created by Jason Kolb, so now the microformat content renders in the browser.

You can either hit the viewer directly using http://www.xformats.org/MicroViewer and whack in an url or you can append the URL to the query string.

Why is Jason doing this? In his words:

"It's also a small piece of a larger project I'm working on, but I wanted to throw it out there because I see a lot of misunderstanding right now about the potential of microformats. Although I think it's very cool that search engines like Technorati are beginning to understand and aggregate microformatted content, that's only half the equation. The other half is that we need to allow PEOPLE to use microcontent as well. "

He then goes on to make a suggestion for the Microsoft Office team:

"Oh and by the way, listen up Microsoft: we need an editor for this stuff. If you really want to leapfrog the competition, do us all a favor and build Live Clipboard and microformat support into the next version of Word and Outlook."

Maybe Brian can pass the word on? I know Shawn will be interest in this. One thought - what about in IE?

Live Clipboard + microformats + RSS (SSE) + Microsoft Outlook screencast

alexbarn — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 02:54:00 GMT

Matt Augustine (works in Ray Ozzie's Concept Development Team) presented a demo at the Supernova 2006 conference in the "Decentralizing Data" workshop, moderated by Tantek Celik.

The demo, available here as a screencast, shows how to leverage Live Clipboard + RSS Simple Sharing Extensions (RSS+SSE) + microformats (mRc?) to synchronize calendars in both directions between a web application (Upcoming.org) and a desktop application (Microsoft Outlook).

A new technique is shown, pushing client SSE feed state to the server via HTTP POST, to circumvent the difficulties of feed cross-subscription in firewalled environments. It also shows a tentative representation of SSE feed references in the Live Clipboard XML format.

More discussion over at Live Clipboard discussion list.

Here's the screencast

Microformats and hCalendar are a key piece of the demo. Talking of microformats, Yahoo! Local have added their support to their listings service. Niall Kennedy and Dan Farber have more on that.

Time to get microformats the t-shirt...

Coping with Information Overload (video)

alexbarn — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 17:19:00 GMT

About four weeks ago I made my way over to ZDNet's studios in San Francisco to be interviewed by Mike Elgan for DevSource and discuss a number of topics close to my heart. The video (15-ish mins) is now published.

Mike asked me about microformats, tagging, information overload, OPML, attention data and of course web 2.0. From the article introducing the interview:

"Are your users drowning in data, and you have no idea how to help them navigate through the information available? It doesn't help to know that you're the only one without a life preserver. Fortunately, the Web is evolving, and new tools are being created to help you — and the people you serve — navigate the expanding information space.

...In our latest DevSource video, Barnett shares his expertise on Web 2.0, OPML, tagging, data programmability, and microformats."

I tried to stay away from pure geek talk and instead talk about some of the benefits and the application of the various technologies we discussed. I touched on Dave Winer's Share Your OPML (see my post on it here), Greg Linden's Findory, the Del.icio.us bookmarking service, Josh Porter's 'the Del.icio.us lesson', and enterprise tagging.

Thanks to Mike Elgan for thinking of me and asking such well researched questions :-)

The interview is part of the DevSource video interview series. Other interviews worth checking out are with Rob Howard talking about the evolution of ASP.NET, Jakob Nielsen discussing usability, Jesse James Garrett (who coined the 'AJAX') on AJAX and the Jeremy Bailenson interview about virtual reality.

Tags: web 2.0, tagging, microformats, attention, opml, video, interview

Go and microformat stuff! ('cause it's going to happen anyway)

alexbarn — Fri, 12 May 2006 10:01:00 GMT

JasonKolb, rightly in my humble opinion, is getting excited by the potential of the microformats, RSS and the clipboard (mRc?) combo (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, read on):

"With the looming rise of the clipboard to transport XML, disguised as a text and using Microformats, the use of the clipboard to transfer data from one place to another is just going to explode. And by data, I mean full records including contacts, events, reviews, and eventually I'm sure, orders, invoices, quotes, and products."

He goes on to predict some of the key milestones that might on the way to mRc reaching a tipping point.

To add, some obvious candidates for mRc inclusion:

hCalendar

Travel sites (BA.com, Orbtiz, etc, saving travel booking info into calendars - see Danny's take on this)
Event booking sites (TicketMaster, etc - movie, theatre bookings info into calendar)
Corporate sites (microsoft.com - event registration info, hq local office address)
See examples in the wild

hCard

Social networking sites (LinkedIn - copy and paste contact info into contacts)
Corporate sites (microsoft.com - hq, local office address into contacts)
See examples in the wild

There are quite a few that still don't 'get' the following, so at the risk of telling you something you already know, I just want to make sure your really 'get' what the excitement about mRc is all about:

mRc = Live data wiring

The microformats + RSS + clipboard (mRc) combo isn't just about copy and pasting static structured data into microformat-aware webpages and clients (though this on its own would pretty powerful stuff). The RSS piece brings with it the magic of 'liveness' to the data - the really simple magic of subscription. The point being that if the original data source changes, it changes at the destination (the subscriber). mRc makes dynamic data links - hence the 'Live' Clipboard name.

So for example, say I copy and pasted the Microsoft HQ address into my contacts app (either web-based or local client)...if the HQ address changed on the source webpage (where I copied it from) then when I next opened the record in my contacts I would then see the updated contact info. (Something to point out before you do here - if the original webpage is deleted the reading software should be designed so it doesn't break: it should use a 'last good' version of the dataset).

Granted, this example may not occur too often - Microsoft's Redmond address won't change for a while - but even here you can see the great value in using a simple and open data exchange format that all apps can standardize upon. Now, hCard isn't just for organizations, it's a people contact information format too...and people change their home street addresses, email addresses and cell numbers regularly enough to make the mRc-enabled scenario really ~~compelling~~ cool.

So I say unto you - go and microformat stuff! ('cause it's going to happen anyway).

Tags: microformats, RSS, clipboard, web, web 2.0, mRc, inevitable, data 2.0

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

Microformats and Yahoo

alexbarn — Thu, 04 May 2006 07:59:00 GMT

Jeremy Zawodny points to the Yahoo Tech site and highlights the fact that their reviews are now in the hReview microformat.

"Microformats are slowly but surely going to create a whole new web of data, ripe for mining, indexing, and exploring."

I agree with Jeremy. Next step - someone will do something useful with all those reviews as data bits.

I just hope MSN / Live team get on the microformats train soon.

Tags: microformats

Semantic web heads - 'More doing, Less theorizing'. Please.

alexbarn — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 19:35:00 GMT

The Guardian takes a look at where we are with Tim Berners-Lee's semantic web. Conclusion? Not very far given the promise of the idea. So far.

In the article there seems to be some kind of aha! expressed by TBL - enough theory already!

"Berners-Lee did concede that as with the world wide web, the semantic web should "serve useful stuff". "One of the problems we've actually had with the semantic web, I only recently realised, is we haven't been doing that."

Not enough useful RDF data has been left online, he explained: "The whole value-add of the web is serendipitous re-use: when you put it out there for one person, and it gets used by who-knows-who. We want to put data out there for one purpose, then find it gets linked into all kinds of data. And that's been not happening, because we forgot 'serve useful stuff', not to mention 'make useful links'."

'More doing, Less theorizing' is TBLs message. Danny Ayers has been urging this too with some passion recently.

What is missing from the semantic web evangelists toolset are the cool demos with working code and easy-to-grokk tools showing and proving end-user value. This SPARQL scheduler gets close, but it just doesn't let the potential shine through. The microformats / live clipboard demos (using real, working code(!)) gets close. Absolutely a step in the right semantic web direction, but we need many more of these to get the excitement really going.

For things to really take off, you (the semweb heads reading this) need to thrill a critical mass of geeks and get them working on this stuff with you. And simplify. Simplicity is how the web went from small to huge in a very short time. Time for a Repeat.

Simply stated: I still haven't seen the semantic web killer Demo - you know, the one that I watch go: 'oh yeah! I really get it now!'. It's 'out there' somewhere, but in somebody's head. That's no good.

Tags: microformats, semanticweb, web

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

My 6 predictions on microformats

alexbarn — Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:25:00 GMT

Joshua Allen helped organize the microformats and structured blogging unofficial session at Mix this week with Marc Canter and Tantek.

Joshua has posted 6 predictions on the topic of microformats that are worth a read (thanks to Tommy for the pointer).

FWIW (inspired by Joshua) here are my six predictions on the topic:

2006 will be a hot year for microformats, but 2007 will be even hotter (am pointing to Chris as he was the first one to help me understand the significance - in a bar somewhere in San Francisco last year - thank you Chris).
Most Microsoftees will not have heard of microformats nor know what they are by the end of 2006. But those Microsoftees that need to know, will.
The OPML freaks will embrace microformats.
Those who said structured blogging wouldn't take off will come around as they realize that using microformats in blogs is structured blogging
Some people will say microformats won't take off, no matter what
New microformat-based business will blossom over the next two years

Tags (did you know these were microformats?): microformats structuredblogging opml web tech

Update:

Chris drops by and provides a couple of good explanatory links:

http://theryanking.com/presentations/2005/webzine/
http://tantek.com/presentations/2006/03/

Adam Green:

"Amen, brother. I got the chance to discuss this issue with Alex, Josh Porter and John Tropea in a recent podcast."

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

My 2006 predictions

alexbarn — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 06:16:00 GMT

Right, enough cataloging of everyone else's 2006 predictions...with about 4 hours to go before the start of my 2006 (flakey drum roll please)...I now unveil my own, er, predictions...

My Eleven Techie / Web and One non-Techie 2006 Prediction(s)

2006 will be tagtastic and a big year for OPML
Sructured blogging will do well but not as well as it'll do in 2007
My wife will start subscribing to websites and she won't know she's using RSS
The first killer apps emerge using RSS + SSE (before end of June)
Youtube will buzz right off the scale
A new even-more-major 'Social Software' player will emerge out of nowhere
Many more articles about attention data in the mainstream press like this one at the FT. Cries of 'I want my attention data!!' will be heard
Tim Berners-Lee is will consistently evangelise the Semantic Web - serious progress to be made this year
Microformats will ride the coattails of the Semantic Web's progress
Allofmp3.com will get noticed (it will this time, I nearly promise)
More distribution of more data. New business mantra: "No APIs, no business" (or "No REST for the wicked")

12. One non-tech prediction: Everyone will have heard of Hard-Fi by end of next year (or a lot of people outside of the UK at least). Bring back that Ska!