Alex Barnett blog : microformats

Social Clouds, XML 10 Years Old, and Honourable Mentions

alexbarnett — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 13:51:00 GMT

The Social Cloud

Kevin Marks is a software engineer at Google, was principal engineer for Technorati and one of the founders of Microformats. In this video Kevin talks about the big picture re: the phenomenon of online social networks in a presentation called The Social Cloud. Great backgrounder to the topic. More Lift videos here.

My Open ID?

Chris Brogen asked Question about OpenID:

"I’ve chosen to use the Wordpress.com installation of OpenID. I tied it to my Wordpress.com account and have so far used it in only two places. I’m thinking that every time I offer up an OpenID, I’ll point to that one. So far so good, right? ( To get up to speed on OpenID, go here).

What happens if Wordpress.com folds? What happens if they change their mind and start charging me, or I leave them for someone else, or whatever?"

Good question, to which you'll find multiple useful answers provided in the post's comments.

Semantic web enablement

The XML spec first public draft was November '96, the final release as a 1.0 was Feb 1998. XML was ten years old Feb 10, 2008. Tim Bray provides a history of the people involved and the events leading up to the birth of XML in his XML People.

Semantic news discovery

Silobreaker "provides relevance by looking at the data it finds like a person does. It recognises people, companies, topics, places and keywords; understands how they relate to each other in the news flow, and puts them in context for the user."

I need to play more to find out how useable / useful this service is, but I like the idea.

Honourable mention

RIA Weekly #06 - What’s Behind Code-Behind, JavaFX with Adobe tools, Microsoft/Yahoo!, and other acquisitions. The Redmonk podcast with Michael Coté and Ryan Stewart (Adobe). Topics include Kevin Lynch as new Adobe CTO, JavaFX vs. Silverlight vs. Air, code-behind annoyance, Google's Android, and the Oracle / BEA deal. I get an honourable mention on the show.

Random but good

Visual Music Instruments - via Kevin Kelly. No manual required, but it would probably help.

The Web Standards Fluster Cuck

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:58:00 GMT

Clucking bell, Molly Holzshlag really has kicked the web standards beehive with a blog post expressing her great discontent with the W3C and WaSP.

Ridiculously Inadequate Backgrounder

Now, before you head off and read the post and the 60+ comments, here's a bit of background on why I find this post of interest (and rather depressing):

I've been following Molly's work for a while now. She first came on to my radar when after providing an update on the progress made between the Microsoft IE, VS and .NET teams and the Web Standards Project (WaSP). That was in 2005. Then in January 2007, I noted Molly's announcement that she had left WASP to join the IE team on a contract basis to work on standards and interoperability issues. I was pleased to see the IE team was making a real effort.

Entirely seperately, but not entirely, in October of 2006 Tim Berners-Lee called for the reinvention of HTML. His call to action caused a bit of a hoo-ha at the time. What's that got to do with Molly? Well, as noted, some of the reactions to TBL's post varied from skepticism, to 'About time!' - and here's the connection with Molly's latest post - to what role the WHATWG will play in what presumably could be a competing effort to the HTML 5 (or XHTML5) spec in progress at the time. However, I was pleased to hear TBL's public calling for progress and hoped we might see some of this progrss after HTML's 8-year stagnation. Then in July 2007, we had the news that HTML5 was being considered by the W3C.

Confused? You should be.

So after my ridiculously inadequate backgrounder, you can now go ahead and read Molly's post, along with the contributions be the cast of characters (the commenters), some of whom are affiliated with various competing factions wrestling with the future of web standards and HTML, who somehow manage to converge the various threads (now including a Fear of Air, the Semantic Web, microformats, Silverlight, XML, community, accessibility, transparency and who-knows-what-else) into what looks like a complete political mess (read: fluster cuck).

Yes, it is depressing,, but such is the business of web standards agreement. A messy business indeed...There's even a YouTube video covering the drama - HTML5 trailer - Find your Hero.

Thanks to Thomas Vander Wal for the link to Molly's post.

Google Maps API support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results - jolly good!

alexbarnett — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 21:37:00 GMT

The Google Maps API blog has announced support for the hCard microformat to Google Maps results.

I won't go into why I think this is cool right now (no time!), but it is cool. If you haven't heard of microformats or understand why the standard is getting attention from a huge player like Google, then check out the links and the microformats podcast I did about a year ago.

Microsummaries are NOT microformats (yet?)

alexbarnett — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:54:00 GMT

Skimming through R/WW's review of Firefox 2, Microsummaries caught my eye.

What are Microsummaries?

"Microsummaries are regularly-updated short summaries of web pages. When you bookmark a web page that has a microsummary, you can choose to display the microsummary as the title of the bookmark. Then, when the page changes, the title will also change, so you can find out the current status of the page just by looking at the bookmark.
For example, a microsummary for a Yahoo! Finance stock quote page might display the current price of the stock and how much it changed today: . A microsummary for Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day page might display today's word: . And a microsummary for a Federal Express package tracking page might display the delivery status of the package: . "

Examples here. Very, interesting. I've not seen any of this at work yet, but the idea sounds great. One thought? Isn't this the kind of application RSS / Atom would suit? Others have discussed this similarity. What about RSS + microfomats?

And is a Microsummary microformat? Well, microsummaries aren't not listed on the microformat spec wiki today, and back on the Mozilla Microsummaries Wiki it says:

"The microsummary generator dialect and the use of the <link rel> element to specify microsummaries should be standardized by the appropriate bodies, which may include the microformats group and the WHATWG."

So, not a microformat today, but maybe in the future (here's blog post discussing this, and in case you're wondering, here's the answer to the question: What is WHATWG?).

It looks relatively simple to get going in terms of creating these microsummaries, but I can't help wondering what confusion might spring from ~~microformats~~ microsummaries and ~~microsummaries~~ microformats. More links on ~~microformats~~ microsummaries from Myk Melez.

Who knows more on the microformat / microsummaries thing? Any more links I should look at for more on this topic?

microformats everywhere + live data web

alexbarnett — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:10:00 GMT

Good to see Conor O'Neill is pretty excited with the realization that this Event plugin enables WIndows Live Writer to publish hCalendar formatted events. hCalendar is one of the microformats.

"Create your own events or find existing events through intergrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post included correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of Live Clipboard copied events and Blog This of events from the Eventful.com website"

Note here that the Eventful.com piece here is not required, you can just publish a microformatted event on your blog post / page. Simply put, the pluin provides a form that when published renders the content in an open standard forma - hCalendar.

He also notes that tagging is supported too - rel-tag is a microformat, you know, the one that has been applied to around 50% of all blog posts. Microformats are everywhere! (Conor, btw, the fact that microformats is now supported by LiveWriter was blogged: see Peter Van Dijck and Don Dodge. :-)

Tom Raftery has been playing and James Corbett seems to be grokking the power of the Live Clipboard + RSS + SSE + microformats (mRc) concept. To quote myself:

"The 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."

If you are wondering what all this microformats business is all about, check out this podcast.

Moving my blog

Alex Barnett blog — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 15:38:00 GMT

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

Search & Enjoy! (Podcast) The Power of Search and Recommendation

admin — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 20:44:00 GMT

"Speakers from Microsoft, Blinkx and Last.fm discussed issues of content regarding search, recommendation, the semantic web and the ownership of data in the Web 2.o era at Content 2.0 on 6th June 2006."

I was on the panel with Matthew Ogle of LastFM and Surunga Chandratillake of Blinx TV, two UK companies doing some very cool stuff in the area of collaborative filtering as content recommendation systems.

FORUM: Search & Enjoy! The Power of Search and Recommendation
Featuring Suranga Chandratillake of Blinkx, Alex Barnett of Microsoft, and Matthew Ogle of Last fm, chaired by Mike Grehan of Marketsmart Interactive
http://www.archive.org/download/content2pointzero/07-c2pz-007.mp3
Filesize: 36.2 meg
Length: 1.15.17

You can listen to the podcast here and a detailed write up here.

I was invited to discuss Attention and My Data. The word Attention (with a capital 'A') had been mentioned a number of times during the day and I took the opportunity to define the concept as I understood it. The My Data notion combined the Attention Data idea with topic of customer data ownership and its portability. I asked both Matthew and Surunga if they were thinking along these lines and they both confirmed that they absolutely were.

Matthew explained how they are planning how LastFM users will be able to export their playlist and associated metadata away with them (which tracks they listen to, how long, times of day, frequency etc) and plug them into other services if that what users want to do. I loved that.

Surunga said he also support this 'my data' approach in the context of Pico but pointed out some of the privacy issues associated with allowing this level of flexibility.

He also made a great point re: the wishlist analogy I've used as attention data. I had talked through the scenario where a user could take their wishlist from Amazon and plug into another booksite, such as Barnes and Noble online to get pricing on those books and recommendations based on the wishlist. Surunga suggested that we should be able to use that same wishlist in any service that was capable of recommendation - the point being that the books you read would be a great pointer to the kind of video, podcasts, blogs and audio content that my be of interest to you.

I really enjoyed the session, starting off my piece by explaining that I was at the conference under false pretences - I wasn't there to pitch Microsoft products of MSN Search or the new raft of Live services, but that I had been invited to the conference because I had been blogging and talking about Attention and the 'my data' stuff and the organizers liked what I wrote. I later found out from the organizers that Microsoft UK pr team had seemed bemused as too why I had been invited to talk and not one of their senior MSN EMEA VP superstars. The power of blogs indeed...

OPML Podcast

admin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:30:00 GMT

Here's an OPMLish podcast for you, recorded tonight with me, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea.

It's all about the draft OPML 2.0 spec and a few other things thrown in such as structured blogging, OPML tools, namespaces and microformats.

We had Adam along today as he's been experimenting with OPML in recent months at his Darwinian Web blog. John Tropea also joined us...John runs the Library clips blog where he has been documenting, extensively, the various OPML experiments and tools that have emerged over the last year.

As usual, show notes below. Enjoy!

The podcast (.mp3, 58 min, 13mb) can be downloaded here, show notes below.

OPML 2.0 Podcast - Alex Barnett, Joshua Porter, Adam Green and John Tropea

Intros
On the Dave Winer's announcement of the OPML 2.0 Draft - Good? bad? ugly?
Data types within OPML (08:30)
Namespaces in OPML (11:30)
Attention, Attention.xml, namespaces and OPML (13:30)
David on Adam, Adam on OPML and Annotated Reading Lists (19:45)
Structured data within OPML, , Grazr, and Microsoft with OPML (24:15)
OPML Tools: Bitty Browser, Grazr mini, Optimal OPML Browser, OPod and OPML Renderer (30:00)
My Bio as an Outline, The Software I Use and Declarative Living (34:30)
OPML, Structured Blogging and Microformats and Namespaces aren't mutually exclusive (36:45)
What are biggest problems are technologies solving? (42:45)
Michael Arrington's Edgeio, structured blogging, my data and distributed data (45:00)
OPML Camp and who's coming (54:30)

Tags: OPML RSS, attention.xml, microformats, Attention, structured blogging, technology, web podcast,

Microformats Podcast

admin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:26:00 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

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

Structured Blogging Podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger

admin — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 19:51:00 GMT

You might have heard of the Structured Blogging initiative announced earlier this week by Marc Canter and others...there was certainly plenty of buzz and reaction to the news, but not all the reaction was rosy.

So Joshua Porter and I thought we'd give Marc Canter and Joe Reger a chance to respond to some of the criticisms and further explain what all this Structured Blogging was about in this podcast. (Part 1 notes and link below, Part 2 tomorrow).

About our guests: Marc Canter is CEO of Broadband Mechanics. Marc co-founded MacroMind in 1984 that later became Macromedia (now merged with Adobe) and also co-founder of Ourmedia.org. Joe Reger started Reger.com a datablogging service in 2003.

I was great fun to do - Marc has a 'tell it as it is' style - not shy in the slightest(!) - thanks to Marc and Joe for their time today. I learnt a great deal more by talking to them and challenging them with some of the quotes from posts that criticized the Structured Blogging idea. From speaking to Marc and Joe today I'd say there are some misunderstandings 'out there' about the SB idea, so I hope the critics at least hear these responses in the podcast and look forward to their responses.

Marc Canter (pic courtesy of Robert Scoble)

Structured Blogging podcast with Marc Canter and Joe Reger, Part 1 (.mp3, 37 minutes, 35mb)

(note: 'bah!...'technical challenges' have forced me to do a fair amount of post editing - the recording got insanely out of sync, which meant everybody was fine to hear except for me, so I've had to delete most of what I said / asked (porbably a good thing ;-), but hopefully it all flows ok...have been v.careful to ensure the necessary editing did not change any 'meaning')

Intro: News of Structured Blogging
What are the goals of Structured Blogging? (04:45)
A new era of blogging (06:20)
Sébastien Paquet's 'Towards structured blogging', 2003 (08:30)
Anil Dash's 'Introducing the Microcontent Client' 2002 (09:00)
PubSub's structured blogging initiative (10:10)
Response to quote from Paul Kedrosky's post, 'Structured Blogging will Flop' (13:30):
"It’s the usual three reasons I trot out repeatedly to technologists with utopian visions who want to change the world on the back of altered user behavior:
The intelligence belongs in the network and in the algorithms"
Top 10 reasons why Structured Blogging will succeed (15:10)
Those damn capitalists! (20:10)
20:45 random call
We're talking about tens of millions of people. 23:00
Respond to quote from Greg Yardley's post, 'Structured Blogging as Web 2.0 Colonialism' (23:45)
"In my more pessimistic moments, I suspect that the omission of a payment mechanism is deliberate, and that the biggest proponents of Structured Blogging are just looking for new ways to aggregate a lot of content, use it to build up a valuable userbase, and sell, generating nothing for us-plain-folks but ‘a bigger megaphone."
Structured Blogging is a compatibility box (25:45)
Microcontent description (MCD) (27:00)
Standards innovation (27:50)
Structured Blogging's future: a dynamic web service: (29:00)
SB Spam and the Identity Gang (32:40)

Tags: structured blogging, microformats, semantic web, Blogging, Web2.0, RSSWeb2.0, RSS, Web2.0, RSS

Attention Podcast with Joshua Porter

admin — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 20:05:00 GMT

This is a two part podcast with Joshua Porter.

Part 1: 43mb, 45min

Part 2: .46mb, 48min

Joshua is a little faint to hear at first, gets a bit better later though, sorry about this.

Part 1 Notes and Links

Turkey, Black Fridays and Boxing Days (intro)
J Wynia's OPML Sampling, attention engine (01:35)
Memeorandum, the echo chamber (04:45)
Shelly is a she (!) (05:40)
Ed Batista on Attention Trust (07:15)
Attention Trust and Root vault (09:00)
Why do we need a third party, why do we need attention brokers? (11:04)
Dave Winer, Danny Ayres, Raymond Kristiansen, Attention.xml, OPML, Attention RDF, microformats (14:40)
Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor, AttentionTech podcast
All those RSS users and they don't know it (18:00)
OPML, attention data sharing (21:00)
What did you learn about Chris now you have his some of his attention data? (23:00)
Self-reported attention (27:00)
OPML wishlist: it's my wishlist (30:20)
Mortgage brokers is making money from my attention - attention brokers (32:55)
Why I don't like Attention recorder (37:00)
My wife is an attention data nightmare (40:00)
empowering customers (41:30)
Attention, Buying a Car, and Control - why am i not in control - ? (43:20)
End of part 1 (45:10)

Part 2 Notes and Links

We've already got some feedback to the first half/part of the podcast. In particular I wanted to highlight Danny Ayres who took the time to post this comment. Thanks Danny, we should keep talking.

As I listened to the recordings to make the notes below, I came realise two things: Firstly, how much work is still ahead of us to work it out in this attention management space (but it will be fun - and of course, it'll never end....). Second, it appears that a non-trivial convergence is occurring, one that James Governor recognises and describes as a "quadrangulation of SSE, attention, RSS and OPML that creates the opportunity, no?".

In the meantime, Dave has pointed to Jeff Jarvis' demand to Yahoo! that they hand over his attention data (RSS)!

Back to the podcast: again, Joshua's voice is relatively faint (compared to mine) but it is audible - sorry about this.

Notes and links below.

Anonymous e-commerce (intro)
Identity 2.0, (02:10)
Why should I trust Microsoft with my attention metadata? (04:10)
Kim Cameron, InfoCard, and Identity Metasystem (07:56)
Anonymous personalization (10:45)
What social model fits here? (14:40)
My OPML as my attention data (18:00)
Have you been to a casino lately? (20:05)
Solove's The Digital Person, Orwellian futures, little brothers, and Kafka's The Trial (24:30)
Minority Report, The iris as a cookie (28:08)
Will we have OPML spiders here soon? (29:00)
Feed ranking in readers, OPML as expression of your attention, Attention engines (30:32)
Users will drive the future of OPML (31:30)
Google Base, user-defined schemas, structured blogging (33:25)
user hacks, emergent standards, emergent tags (36:00)
Ajax, Aflax, Flash-based data visualization (40:45)
Hacking is really the only way to innovate, 45:00
End (47:50)

Tags: A ttention, OPML, RSS, attentiontrust, attention.xml, podcast