Posts filed under 'Microformats'
It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’s Twitter / jaiku feeds.
See you back in October!
February 29th, 2008
Being a fan of the so called Semantic Web and knowing the long way we still have to track to reach it, all the things that takes us a bit closer to it has me on board. So it has been with Microformats, I had played a bit with Structured Blogging before but rapidly moved to what was ended up being known by Microformats for their multipurpose and not just for blogging.
A brief introduction for non-geek persons about Microformats and why they’ll became ever so important: The web is full of information, trapped information, hidden relations, hidden contents, consider for instance a simple news article, a review in a product page, that information is trapped under the rumble of it’s page HTML. Not nice, isn’t it? Through the separation of layout/content we already improved, since we can read each one of those examples hiding the details of the document structure focusing on the information thats important!
Being intelligent beings as we tend to consider ourselves, we have the ability to spot which parts of the information are relevant, if I look at a contact page, I immediately search for something that looks like an address, phone or email contact. It’s something we’re used to. Well the problem raises that when it matters with information we really can’t depend on humans! 
To a program reading a regular webpage, all that rumble and layout information, etc. is just the same! That’s were Microformats became essential! They allow us to seemingly “format” that information, so that humans and machines alike are able to extract the REALLY important parts! Microformats are much more than that, but for today’s introduction that the key idea to retain.
After some of the big companies embraced them a few months ago, Microformats seemed to be on the right track for massive adoption, and yesterday the all mighty W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) seems to have given a step the consolidation of Microformats by providing a set of use cases (GRDDL) that provide real-world scenarios and examples of Microformat in use, as they quote it:
(…)
GRDDL is the bridge for turning data expressed in an XML format (such as XHTML) into Semantic Web data. With GRDDL, authors transform the data they wish to share into a format that can be used and transformed again for more rigorous applications.
(…)
Once data is part of the Semantic Web, it can be merged with other data (for example, from a relational database, similarly exposed to the Semantic Web) for queries, inferences, and conversion to other formats.(…)
I strongly suggest reading some of thew3c use cases:
As complementary to the Microformats Website, the nice to have in hand Microformats Cheat Sheet and the book written by John Allsopp: “Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 “
For people reading this here in the Portuguese quarter I promise that in coming weeks you’ll get your opportunity to learn a bit more about Microformats! enough said! 
September 13th, 2007
The Web2Expo Berlin Tracks have been unleashed. Just by looking at the tracks, I can already guess that’s going to be a very special and unique conference in terms of tech conferences around Europe. Web2Expo will cover five different tracks:
The tracks session list is so large and covers so many interesting subjects, that the hard job is going to be choosing which ones to attend to. A special note for which I’m really glad is that we’ve managed to get some portuguese representations in there: Fred (WeBreakStuff) is going to moderate the panel “Moving from 1.0 to 2.0: Philosophies and Structures for Change” and I’ll be presenting “Conversational Design“:
Once we progress from the User Centered Design to Community Centered Design we’ll need to identify and gather a similar set of best practices regarding it’s Community design. This presentation collects more or less the key features and interactions that a successful Community should display in order to empower their users and facilitate conversation between its members.
This presentation aims to be a bridge between Usability Best Practices and Community Centered Design, a practice that can maximize the networking and crowd effect under online user communities.
Web2Expo will also include a Foo/BarCamp style event that’s being organized by Nicole Simon entitled Web2open which will blend pre-scheduled content with an open grid where the attendees can fill in sessions they either want to discuss or present themselves. It certainly going to be a unique space to connect with other attendees, learn more about elements of Web 2.0, and share their knowledge and experiences.
So if not before, see you in Berlin, next November!
September 8th, 2007
My inner geek rejoices with the fact that Microformats have finally got a little more buzz lately! One particular Microformat I’ve been using is XFN (Xhtml Friends Network), aka the Relationships Microformats. This particular Microformat allows me to easily state the sort of relation I have with other people and for instance the blogs I link to.
Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about whether she should or shouldn’t use them on her upcoming service and although to me the question had a dead simple question, convincing her and others wasn’t as simple as I expected!
People expect us to always have some sort of golden rules, some well defined goals or at least some clear advantages for spending development time/effort in implementing something we’re suggesting. I confess in this case we don’t have them, for for the sake of innovation I really recommend on jump into the unknown sometimes, just for the fun of it.
From our conversation I managed to sort out some key ideas on why we should all start using XFN on every service that can use it:
- CONTACTS AREN’T ALL BORN EQUAL!
As a user I clear understand that some people are more important to me than others, accept it, it seems to me and although I don’t call everyone friend, I call them all contacts, some of the are actually my friends and family, so some type of differentiation is necessary!
- EARLY IS AN ADVANTAGE!
If you think that you might use Microformats like XFN on your service, start using them from day 1! That’s the only way to ensure that you start collecting that extra information from the very begging and your users will start using them on every relation that they define on your service.
This is actually a key factor, all social networks start with high rate of new profiles creation and with them a lot of social relations are created too, having XFN introduce later in this process means that your users will have to endure in a redefine process for every relation they already had on the system, and to me, quite few of your users will actually do it, leaving you with in a mix state of information, some of they have XFN info other don’t.
- LESS ISN’T ALWAYS GOOD!
That’s the case with information, traditionally the more information you have, the better! With XFN in particular, the managers of that information will have a better understanding of the types of relationships that are sprouting on their services, allowing them to gather a clear typification of their user base, their interests and the type of relations they’re creating on the service: Who are they inviting, friends? Colleagues? Family? With little effort, this extra information, allow to envision new features where you should really invest some development time in!
To me is relatively simple, even if at the very beginning this extra information is pretty much useless, I really believe that sooner rather than later we’ll all greet ourselves by having it rather than not. As in so many other situations, when we collect information that by itself doesn’t represent or add any value, in the end we always seem to come up with new and interesting ways of using it.
- GROUPS LACK CONVENTION!
One of the reasons presented during the conversation for not using XFN was that from the User point of view you could get the same experience by allowing them to create and use different user groups.
Well thats just WRONG!
Sure, groups allow you to separate your friends, but if you allow your users to create user-defined groups, you have no way of actually knowing what type of people he/she is collecting in a particular group. By sticking with the XFN closed attributes you know that the users that used them, although randomly they’ll use it in the same sense and situation!
Those were the main results from our quick conversation! Now that I’ve written them, they seem pretty common sense, but they really weren’t when we started.
We surely missed some other reasons for using XFN, does anyone has other “motivation” factors for using them?
August 31st, 2007
I’ve been following the Microformats project pretty much from the beggining, but we never learn as much from documentation or even by reading their mailling list, as from hearing one of the minds behind it presenting the subject: Tantek Çelik on Microformats at the “Future of Web Apps”.
If you haven’t figure out what Microformats is all about, this should be a first in your reading/hearing queue!
October 16th, 2006