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Technorati and Microformats

toebird — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 01:43:39 +0000

I claimed my blog at Technorati then I had a look around to see what the heck it really is. Spiders! Everywhere! Itâ€™s an index of blogs that get crawled by spiders for content, and makes that content findable through searches. I can immediately see why this is important. While I donâ€™t really care about most of the CRAP people blog about, what if I wanted to know what people thought about a particular product before I buy? I canâ€™t trust the seller, so I turn to other buyers opinions. The average Joeâ€™s blog can be lost in the big sea of Google and Yahoo, but Technorati makes it findable. It has the pulse of American (worldly?) culture right now, and is an indication of what general, public opinion is today. Itâ€™s easy to use and even has a cute sidekick, the mini. Itâ€™s a window that stays open on the desktop with a refresh every 60 seconds for up-to-the-minute hot topics. When the blogging society starts using Microformats, I’ll be able to zero in on product & movie reviews. No more listening to the paid TV critics, whom I often suspect are endorsed by the parent companies of the movie makers. I will trust the OVERALL thoughts and blogs of the every-day average Joes collectively, before I trust a seller.

Detecting Microformats

toebird — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:39:03 +0000

So how do you detect a microformat? Install the plugin in Firefox and it brings up a sidebar that highlights items you can click to save.Â So I’m told.Â The plugin only works on earlier versions, not 2.0.Â Besides that, blogs about microformats tell of how they couldn’t get this or that to work. So maybe were’ not up and running yet, but microformats look like they will have a prosperous future.Â The trend for people to write semantic code is driving people to write microformats now, even though it’s not mainstream. You have to use class names anyway, why not use some standard ones? Data like events, topics, geo locations can be mapped to the microformat class name, and everyone already understands these bits of information.

vCard: Evolution to Microformats

toebird — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 18:10:20 +0000

You know when you click on a contact in your email address book you get something that looks like an index card? Essentially, that’s what we call a Vcard. It’s a standard developed in the late 90’s by the IETF. It’s the first electronic business card that I can remember, and it holds information about yourself, ready for distribution. This is still around today. Simply make an entry in your address book about yourself and then export it (usually File, Export). You should be able to export it as yourname.vcf. Now, anytime you want to distribute your business card, just attach that file to your email.
Now we see this concept moving from your address book to the Internet. The same standards used for the vCard are being applied to HTML, hence the birth of hCard. The names associated with this standard have now been turned into class names for your markup. Now we have little electronic business cards as bits of XHTML sprinkled throughout our HTML code. The concept has grown to include not only names and addresses, but dates, reviews, events, etc.
Creating the hCard is easy, there’s even tools that will build the code for you: http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator

To find out more about microformats, I recommend http://microformats.org/ as well as listening to the Podcast by Tantec Celik found here: http://microformats.org/wiki/podcasts