Comments - Microformats: The Quiet Revolution - Articles - MIX Online

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Ryan Cromwell — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:56:48 GMT

Is there a place which lists or organizes all known microformats? Advertising that list would go a long way to getting people to embed these microformats in their sites.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Thomas Lewis — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:14:40 GMT

If you go to microformats.org, they list out some of the popular ones on the home page and have a link for more of them which is located at http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page. We are big fans of the site!

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Karsten Januszewski — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:27:12 GMT

Yahoo's search monkey has indexed MIcroformats and is a great way to find Microformats. For example, here's a query that finds all hCards on a page: http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkxh1Yf9IU3YBFIdXNyoA?p=searchmonkeyid%3Acom.yahoo.uf.hcard+&y=Search&fr=&ei=UTF-8 You can also pass search terms as well. Here's a query that searches for all web pages that have an hCard and the word "oomph": http://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=A0oGkxgbYv9IqHQBVStXNyoA?p=searchmonkeyid%3Acom.yahoo.uf.hcard+oomph&fr=&ei=UTF-8

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

John Allsopp — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 21:50:30 GMT

Hi Ryan, as Thomas mentions, there's microformats.org My microformats focussed blog and site also has online and PDF based overviews of all the well used microformats http://microformatique.com/ HTH john

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Chris Messina — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:46:07 GMT

@Ryan: specifically take a look at this page: http://microformats.org/wiki/implementations

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Juan Gonzalez — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:09:50 GMT

Timing on the launch of the toolkit couldn't be better. While there are plenty of sites out there which support microformats, we need the average user to embrace so content can start to be reused across the web. New extensions on both IE and FF will definitely help boost adoption. At PlanetEye we are interested in consuming microformatted reviews of travel destinations. I'm sure just like us there will be many other services which will jump at them as soon as the content starts to flow.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

L. E. MORGAN — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:03:54 GMT

Have some knowledge, but just really searching for add-ons to help with new computer right now. The transfer of contacts is what caught my eye. However, don't see exactly how to do it. Help anyone?

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Thomas Lewis — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:58:11 GMT

L. E. Morgan, sorry for the delay in response. When you install the Oomph add-in, you go to a page with microformatted content like a contact. If one exists, a gleam will display in the top-left corner of your browser. You click on it and it will show you all the contacts on the page. You can then click any of the icons below it to import the contact into Windows Live, GMail, Mobile Me, etc. Hope this helps.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Angela — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:10:30 GMT

I am not a very computer literatr person, but it seems to me that ISP providers are losing out. Don't you think that having a micorformat built in to their browser could break the strangle hold on the competition? Imagine having an opportuniy to buy that kind of technology off the bat and then have an easy tutorial to teach how to use it? Meaning the most inept computer user could learn microformatting while surfing the web, not only would it give the end user managability but give them a sense of satisfaction, ie: "getting what they paid for". Many end users need to use the internet really care not to, or rather cannot appreciate it because its not as "user friendly" as it makes out to be, especially those without an acessible computer environment nearby.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Risotto — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:44:23 GMT

Microformats are great for new websites, but what about old ones? Who is going to annotate those? Then again, we have an open world assumption in the web, while microformats have a closed view (i.e. only what is specified by the ontologies). While the data is already there, why can't it be recognized using some kind of business intelligence instead of having to mark it out? Personally I think this just adds another meta layer to the whole system instead of fixing the fundamental problem.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Joshua Allen — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:03:33 GMT

Hi Risotto, Thanks for checking this out. I've worked quite a bit with the various ways of making the web smarter, and have come to the conclusion that there isn't one either/or solution -- there are a combination of things. Search engines use machine learning techniques to extract semantics from pages, but they also use KR techniques to extract information placed in the page by the page authors. People who read Doctorow's "metacrap" post often arrive at the wrong conclusion, and assume that machine learning is less prone to author spam -- when in fact the reason we had to create nofollow tag was because ML systems are equally as spammable. Note that microformats are specifically a reaction *against* the formal ontological approach of RDF. There is a more subtle point that microformats sit atop existing HTML semantics. IOW, if you need to define a bunch of new markup to define your microformat, then your microformat is less likely to be successful -- the successful microformats leverage semantics that people are alrady using. Of course, you could argue that people should just stop writing HTML altogether, and could just publish all of their documents as GIF or PNG files. That was certainly a common attitude early in the infancy of the web. But we know today that this is absurd -- using POSH (plain old semantic HTML) gives all kinds of benefits. And once you take that step, you are essentially using microformats already. We have Molly and Nate delivering a workshop track at MIX09 specifically on this topic. When you combine POSH with unobtrusive JS and CSS, the way the web is meant to be built, the result is really magic.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Anthony Fry — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:05:12 GMT

Do You Think we will soon see antivirus included with broadband package services ? How do they stop viruses attacking these mobile phones that connect to the internet ? a possible nice little earner ?

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

kalimevole — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:38:49 GMT

There is and other point of view of Web evolution. The evolution of content. At the beginning we learn how to use the the content at the internet (1.0). Then we discovered how to generate the content (by the users) - it is 2.0. And now we learn how to describe (or specify) the content - it is 3.0.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Rohan Cragg — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:23:43 GMT

One slight problem with the article - I can't see the images. The URLs are all staging.visitmix.com, I tried one without the 'staging' subdomain and it works so you might want to fix those...

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Hans Hugli — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:47:23 GMT

Thanks for pointing that out @Rohan. Will look into this.

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Joe — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 20:31:56 GMT

Hi! I read about the microformats the other day and watched the presentation at mix09. Im desingning the new site for my little company and will be including them, although i am from Mexico and these things are way advance for my country, here you mention vcards or microformats and people say: "Que?" Anyway, i was all morning trying to get the microformats code to work on my spanish version of outlook, had a lot o troble with the "org" and "tel" tags, the info doesnt show on the final file that you open in outlook, but oomph reads it. I think i tried everything on the microformats.org website about that, it beats me what could be wrong. Oomph is really really cool! It was a great morning learning experience! Thanks!

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

james kairns — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 17:56:35 GMT

I only learned about Microformats today while surfing. I am still not quite sure what the intent is of the uses of this technology but I think I want my PC to have the imdicated facilite. Where and how can I install the software to make microformat available to my browsers. jamos069

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

touailia moncef — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:54:30 GMT

but please

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

Toby Painter — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:25:54 GMT

aFTER OBTAINING INFORMATION ABOUT THIS PRODUCT I COULDN'T HELP BUT GO FOR IT. WOW THIS IS SOMETHING THAT NEEDS TO GET INTO MORE PEOPLES HANDS GREAT!!!!!!!

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

james laxton — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:10:28 GMT

i hope this thing works

Re: Microformats: The Quiet Revolution

james laxton — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:10:32 GMT

i hope this thing works