Tags: Microsoft - Mix06 - microformats - structured blogging

I just came back from an "unmeeting". An informal meeting, officially outside of the scope of Mix06, and totally unrelated to Microsoft, although there were a few Microsoft guys present. Marc Canter (some of you may know him as the founder of OurMedia) and Tantek Celik (from Technorati) were the initiators. The unmeeting was held at the worst possible location: in the food court at the Venetian. The background noise from people eating or passing by made the speakers hardly understandable. After half an hour, security agents came along, suspicious of all those guys sitting in the food court without eating or drinking.

What was the unmeeting about? Microformats and structured blogging. In May of last year, I attended a presentation by Carl Beeth at the Brussels Information Architecture Meetup which gave a pretty good introduction to the subject. When blogging or publishing content on the web, we tend to put everyting in one flat text field. But when it comes to announcements of events, to reviews of movies, music or books, to recipes or to anything else that could have an implicit structure, it would be better to put some microformat code around it, hidden in the HTML. This would enable aggregators and search engines to make better use of the data. You could create your own personal calendar from event announcements that you find on the web, provided that these announcements use microformats.


With different groups promoting microformats, microcontent and structured blogging, there is no need for standards wars, says Canter. "Let's superset everything! Let the software take care of all the problems. And we need the big guys like Microsoft, AOL and Google to support this stuff through browsers and search engines. And now we even got Bill Gates on our side!" Together with the people of microformats.org, Canter has created plugins for Movable Type and for Wordpress that support microformats. Now he wants open API's and shared servers.

Tantek Celik from Technorati stressed the fact that users should always own their own data. Google Base is a bad example: only Google can index the data in Google Base, and that's bad. Users should never store their [public] data in a place that others can't index.

Kalyia Hamlin drew our attention to itags.net, an identity-based tagging standard, which is also a good example of a microformat. Marc Canter saw the need for a "tag register" encompassing all microformats and tagging standards.

When the security guards became nervous about the fact that all those people at the unmeeting were not eating nor drinking at the food court, Marc Canter concluded the meeting with: "In the spirit of the distributed web, let's break up into clusters, which they can't control!"







Also read Jeff Ooi's article on the same subject.