Monthly Archives: June 2006

Microformats, from your blog

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So, you write about an upcoming event, so that your readership will know about it. Some read it, some miss it. The online event aggregators never heard about your weblog, and when they scanned it, they saw nothing but regular HTML.

[Structured Blogging](http://structuredblogging.org/) has the tools to help those aggregators. By enhancing your “Write Post” page to also include “Write Event”, “Write Review”, this plugin enables you to invisibly present events and reviews as such to robots.

[Microformats](http://www.microformats.org/) are about having **structured data** (such as a review “3/10 for lousy Ice Age 2″, or an event “Battle of the Hackers, all weekend at Peach Pit”) **inside the regular HTML**. Data inside this pattern can be picked up by robotic visitors to your site, to be aggregated, and re-presented elsewhere.

Why do it now? If you have some kind of review site. If you have a list of important business cards that should face the world. Or, if you just want some added meta-data to your lists. But what if you don’t have those things?

[Jeremy Keith](http://adactio.com/) and I talked about the cite attribute on blockquote elements in HTML. Not often used. Javascript People are more keen to use these things, because understand just how valuable that extra information can be, when some additional scripting has been added to a webpage. A page with microformats added looks just like ordinary text, without extra styling or scripting added. Some effort is needed, if you want the presence of the metadata to “stand out”.

Is the following true? “The people who can see future value in not-currently-valuable stuff, they have a (theoretical) responsibility to tell others about it, at least.”

The weblog on Structured blogging says it clearly: it’s not about responsibility, it’s about getting value yourself, from your own data. Sharing is cool, but value for me is what’ll draw others in as well.

I came to think about these things after I’d talked with [Ben Griffiths](http://www.reevoo.com/blogs/bengriffiths/) at [Reevoo](http://www.reevoo.com/) who aggregates product reviews. Talking to Jeremy Keith, about hContact cards was also inspiring.

Your comments, followed: using coComment

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Now, this blog is using [coComment](http://cocomment.com), to make my blog comments elsewhere visible to you folks, complete with their own RSS feed. (Service is free, simple, etc etc.)

coComment: Follow your conversations

Privacy? I missed the JP Rangaswami presentation at Reboot, but it seemed like one the interesting ones (just test it with the surname litmus test: 10/10 – see, it really works). JP talked about regular life in crowded India. The privacy we Westerners crave, cherish, defend – is a non-issue in most of Indian culture.

The typewriter person, who’ll accept hand-written notes, and turn them into emails: not a problem of him or her reading the notes, and knowing their contents. People know each other anyway!

This concept blew me away. Thanks to [Rob Paterson](http://smartpei.typepad.com/) for shortening & explaining that presentation for me. (Oh, and thanks Rob, for being our guest. Kudos for actually drinking the *slivovic*.)

Reboot8: Now done

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Whew.

The web-and-other-things conference [Reboot](http://www.reboot.dk/) is over for this year. I attended, this my second year, with some notion of what to expect.

Meeting people again was a hit.

I got to meet Flash guy and music composer [Niko Nyman](http://nnyman.com/) of Helsinki, and many other HKI folks. [Jyri Engeström](http://zengestrom.com) was wearing thin-golden-rimmed glasses which made him look like a youthful John Backus (of [BNF](http://cui.unige.ch/db-research/Enseignement/analyseinfo/AboutBNF.html) fame). Couldn’t find the image with the likeness online, though.

Since the format of the conference is more of a space-rocket ride at 20 meters from the ground over highly interesting landscape, the participants are careful with their time, and allow detailed conversations & elaborations to spill over, into the blogosphere, for later.

Lesson: **Business cards are convenient.**

The morning of Day 1, I was packing my stuff (doing the mistake of lugging a laptop), and my wife asked me if I had any business cards left. Oops. I took 5 of them to the conference — it was too late to bike to the the office, across town, to grab them, so I attended the conference anyway. The same thing happened the next day, when I thought the activity was to commence at 10. It turned out an interesting presentation was on at 9.15, and I had to skip biking across town again. Luisa’s fix for this was simple and elegant: Print two sheets of label stickers with contact details. Adhesive business cards.

Lesson #2: **Laptops can be a hindrance.**

So, I had a more agile day 2, with only a little Moleskine notebook and a cheap pen. Switching contexts on a free, empty, white, small piece of paper is… what you do. It’s not even an activity to make a new category, a new partition, a new selection – on paper, it all flows.

Presentation picking for the curious: When presented with many choices, **among the unknown presenters, pick the one with the most interesting surname**. This leads you away from hearing only Thought Leaders and A-listers, which can be a good thing. Your best friend has already videocast the presentation in the Big Room anyway, so you’re gonna hear that later, on your way to work. The skunkworks, improvised, extra stuff: that’s often missed in the post-event documentation flurry. (Note to self: write a post on Guy’s 20×20 format!)

Meeting [Pelle Brændgaard](http://www.stakeventures.com) again was a rare pleasure. Views, ideas, literature hints, war stories, commentary: we were quite the chatters. Pelle’s lived the crypto-dream Back In The Day (those of you who read [Cryptonomicon](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) will know), and the free spirit is still vibrant with him. He’s one of the rare men who can smoke cigars, and still look natural and simple. His work-mate Tim was also there, great chap.

(Note to self: Since this is not a list of great people, I should stop listing them.)

“At Reboot, the hacker quotient is low, and the hackers that are here are mostly open-minded folks”, said UK hacker Tom Armitage (who’ll be in the 20×20 post as well). He’s right. It’s about going outside your own domain, to learn about… the other things.

Thanks, Mygdal, and thanks Nyholm, and thanks crew. This year was also great.