Category: microformats

Announcing: Barcamp San Francisco

Barcamp San Francisco

Couldn’t wait any longer to get this one outta the bag… but based on some prodding from Kevin Burton at ETech and Paul D Smith on the Barcamp wiki, I’d like to announce that Barcamp is coming to San Francisco June 24-25, to coincide with Kevin Werbach’s Supernova.

Now, there a coupla cool bonuses I want to mention. First, the Tuesday before Supernova we’ll be having another Mash Pit in San Francisco. Venue TBD, but I’ll be looking into France Telecom’s space again or possibly prodding Adaptive Path.

The night of the Mash Pit we’ll be having some kind of geektacular Microformats 1-year Anniversary party. Dunno about where, but following Mash Pit, that’s what we’ll be doin’. Ask Tantek.

On Wednesday, Supernova starts and goes through Friday. At the close of Kevin’s event, we’ll have the traditional Barcamp Social Kick-off party somewhere in the city… figure around 8pm — with everyone from ‘nova invited.

Saturday we kick it off around 10am, doin’ the whole Barcamp thing, finishing out sometime around 4pm on Sunday. Phew!

Now I should make it clear that the primary instigators of this weeklong fete include both me and Tantek… with the full support of the Supernova crew. We’re looking to make these events as complementary and mutually supportive as possible and to that end, will be working together tightly to make sure that as many folks as possible get a chance to participate one way or another. Mash Pit and Barcamp will remain free as always (donations welcome!) and if you’re in town for Supernova anyway, well, you now have any excuse to come a little early and stay a bit longer.

Definitely; this is gunna be fun.

Love 2.0, Microformats and OSWL podcasts

Tara and I get interviewed by Chris and PonziChris Pirillo has posted the Love Two Point Oh interview that he and Ponzi conducted at SXSW of Tara and me.

Meanwhile, Brian Oberkirch posted two interviews of me for his Weblogs WorkNotes where I discuss independents, Barcamp, Mash Pit, and WineCamp and then separately about microformats.

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

50K Wikis!Hometown hero (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of fame) has hit 50,000 PBWikis (what’s a PBwiki?).

You’ll note that almost all the wikis that I use today are PBWikis: Barcamp, Munified, Coworking, CivicForge, Mash Pit and the new Micro Microformats wiki.

Why? Ease of use, simplicity, speed… and the right subset of features and a simple interaction model. It feels solid. It looks good. It does what I want it to do (I’m also watching Stikipad as it offers Textile).

And now it looks like I’ll even be getting to do some work for the team on some upcoming usability and design tasks. Not to mention microformats integration. Nice.

Bonus: So I’m curious — what features do you look for in a wiki? What’s missing from your experience? Essentially, if you ever had a wiki feature request that you’re dying for (or something you never want to see in a wiki again), what would you say?

MicroID – Identity in a shade of microformat

Doc points to microformat-compliant MicroID (“Small Decentralized Verifiable Identity”) by Jabber founder Jeremie Miller:

…a new Identity layer to the web and Microformats that allows anyone to simply claim verifiable ownership over their own pages and content hosted anywhere. The technology is radically simple and capable of empowering new and unique meta services with only minor effort.

I read over the description, but I still don’t quite get it.

A simpler solution (for web authors at least) is reciprocity using XFN. Essentially if I have access to two websites, I can link between them using the rel="me" microformat — very similar to what Technorati does with its claiming snippet.

So one rel="me" link implies an unconfirmed relationship, two or more confirms, for the purpose of building an exploratory network (non-authoritative), a relationship. Add in an

and you can start building an ad hoc profile that will result with a profile like the one I’m building on ClaimID.

So the way I see it, MicroID allows me to lay ownership to any piece of arbitrary content on the web, provided I can set the class of the object. In cases where that’s not possible, I’m not sure MicroID will work.

With the rel="me" solution, you can claim URLs that you can create links with rel values. Neither is perfect but both are decent uses of microformats for faking identity.

Update: change MicroID from a “.com” to a “.org” . Thanks Kevin!

The imminent rise of Microformats

Bill Gates on Microformats

It really is only a matter of time before this stuff really takes off. With Bill on the bully pulpit yakkin‘ with TimO about it, dropping references it during the Mix ’06 keynote, Ray Ozzie pimping them at ETECH, LinkedIn coming to the party, folks misrepresenting core ideas already… I mean sweet! I smell a movement on the march.

Update: Kevin “Quicktime” Marks has the transcript and more formats.