An excellent session all about microformats (ways of marking up content to bring semantic richness), with Tantek Çelik and surprise guest Jeremy Keith

Moderator: Tantek Çelik Chief Technologist, Technorati
Frances Berriman Volume
Michael Kaply IBM
Glenn Jones Creative Dir, Madgex
Tantek Çelik Chief Technologist, Technorati

The session started with Tantek coming to the stage with layers on T-Shirts on… very odd, but he soon explained that he was going to explain the history of microformats through the T-shirts he was wearing (each layer was a company T-shirt that help evolved microformats since 2003).

The timeline was as follows:

• Started after Tantek and Eric Meyer had a discussion at SXSW 2003
• Launched December 2003
• Wordpress and blo.gs added support month after launch
• Eventful & upcoming at year later
• Launched microformats.org in 2005
• Flickr and Technorati (where Tantek works) then added
• 2006 - event sites adopt (like supernova)
• 2007 - standford.edu adds support, showing that large websites can get microformats implemented

Operator - Firefox extension

Micheal then talked about Operator - an extension for Firefox that adds microformats support. Features include:

• Finding tags on a page and those tags can then instantly be used as search terms on other sites
• Adding events to Google calendar
• Finding events on Google maps
• Finding contact / calendar information (hCard / hCalendar), which then can be exported to applications like Outlook or Yahoo contacts
• Debug mode to test whether microformats are used correctly

The beauty of Operator is that it gives users easy access to data on the web. The panel then raised that Firefox 3 may add user tools by default

Operator can be downloaded at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/

Backnetwork

Glenn used the backnetwork (an event tool he originally created for d.Construct) as an example of how microformats can be used. Highlights include:

• Contact info microformated and relationships between people added
• Created form to add xfn (friends etc.) and then a relationship cloud based on strongest relationships
• Reviews form produced microformated data and then aggregated via RSS
• A prototype currently in development that scrapes microformats from a specified URL

How has it happened?
Francis (who is a community admin for microformat) then quickly explained how microformats are created:

• Written by open community and there’s no task force (anyone can get involved)
• Managed through “The process” - a way to people stop and think what they are doing before creating a new format
• The process encourages research, which is when some “no so good” microformats ideas vanish
• A good spec, based on traditional scientific methods, are required
• The main reason why microformats have taken off? Because there isn’t too many and they are not complicated

Questions
Tantek then opened up to floor for 30mins of audience questions. Highlights as follows:

Are there search engines for microformats?

• kitchen.technorati.com - searches for microformats in blogs
• edgeio.com - aggregates hListings from blogs and then displays results as hListings

Are there any mobile tools?

Jeremy Keith was then invited to the stage to demonstrate a Firefox plugin called Tails Export, which manages microformats in an embedded interface.

The cool thing up Tails Export’s sleeve was that it added bluetooth connectivity, so you could transmit hCards easily to a bluetooth enabled phone

What does it take to implement?

Bit of a set up in this question I feel (the panel knew the person asking the question), but basically if you know how to do HTML you know how to do microformats… its just using specific class names, but buy doing this data becomes a read only low level api via applications like Operator.

Overall one of the best sessions so far.