Microformats: A topic of much intrigue with an audience to match

A topic of much intrigue with an audience to match: a perfect summation of Refresh-DC’s Microformats presentation last week. Almost as impressive as the topic and discussion was the audience; including industry leaders from such companies like AOL as well as industry authors and influencers such as Eric Meyer and Cindy Li.

The night started with a brief primer on “Microformats: New Standards?” by M. Jackson Wilkinson of Grassroots Enterprise. Jackson provided what amounted to be a basic overview on Microformats; but more importantly, a foundation for an insightful discussion to follow.

Jackson defined Microformats easily as being:

• Sets of standardized XHTML tags and classes
• Attach extra meaning to web-published information
• Extends semantic meaning to computers
• Allows for increased functionality for humans
• Easy to implement
• Few disadvantages

One of Jackson’s focus points was on Microformats’ ability in making data more useful by having it become easier to find and even resulting in more meaningful search results. Jackson was quick to note several of the industry leaders who have rapidly and successfully implemented this technology; leaders such as: Yahoo! Local, Flickr, Google, and Technorati to name a few.

Jackson noted some of the more popular Microformats currently being utilized and developed today:

• Calendars/Events (hCalendar)
• People/Companies (hCard)
• Opinions, Reviews (hReview)
• Social Connections (XFN)
• Resumes (hResume)

Some may ask, “What can Microformats do for me?” Well, I personally believe the answer is “Not much”, at the moment. Of course, whether applicable to your current needs or not, as soon as a technology arrives – some cool tool to play with it is sure to follow. Jackson nears the conclusions of his presentation with a few “MicroFan Tools” as he referred to them:

• Technorati microformat Search
• Technorati hCard to vCard Converter
• Tails & Smartzilla Extensions
• Greasemonkey scripts
• Bookmarklets
• Konqueror has built-in support
• IE7 Add-ons in development

Jackson’s presentation along with several helpful and useful Microformat examples can found online at: http://jounce.net/presentations/refreshMicroformats/

For anyone interested, I highly suggest checking out Refresh-DC. I don’t typically like these sorts of small gatherings or “meet-ups”. However, this was an extremely insightful and entertaining group – I am actually excited for the next meeting!

More about Refresh-DC

Refresh is a community of web designers, developers, and other new media professionals working together to refresh the creative, technical, and professional aspects of their trades in the Washington, DC, area.

Our goal is simple: bring together the best and brightest new media developers in the DC metro area so that we may learn from one another. Our industry is too rich for any one person to “know it all.” That’s where we come in.

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