microformats – Page 7

MashPit by day, Microformats by night

Today I’ll be hosting the third Mash Pit in San Francisco at the Wharton West, downtown at 101 Howard Street, Suite 500. Things kick off at 10am and go until 5pm (not 6pm, necessitated by the facilities and the fact that we’ll be hungry!).

What can you expect? Well, it’s pretty simple. The goal of the day is work on mashups — particularly ones that work on solving “human problems” — like making it easier to find wifi cafes in the city or autotag your photos based on your Upcoming or EVDB account (which, by the way, is really about making it easier to help folks find your photos later).

Tara and I came up with the agenda this morning. We’ve got a bit of experience now, so we’ll see how it goes!

And of course, after this is all over, tonight is the Microformats 1-year Anniversary Party at 111 Minna. We’re pretty excited about how far this little fledgling community project has come in the last year and want to celebrate! It gets going around 8pm — and, if you can’t be there, you can always order a shirt!

Ah! And before I forget, a big thanks to Tara, Tantek, the Supernova folks (especially Kevin and Jeanne!), and Mozes for helping make Mash Pit possible!

For the rest of the month

iCal icon …there will be nothing but events. I kid you not.

June 20, 2006 – 10:00 – 18:00 – MashPit San Francisco III – at Wharton West, 101 Howard Street, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA
June 20, 2006 – 20:00 – Microformats 1-year Anniversary Party – at 111 Minna Street, San Francisco, CA
June 21 – 23, 2006 – Supernova 2006 – at The Palace Hotel, 2 New Montgomery Street, San Francisco, CA
June 23 – 24, 2006 – BloggerCon IV – at CNET, 235 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA
June 23, 2006 – 19:00 – 24:00 – BarCampSanFrancisco Kick-off Party – at Microsoft Offices, One Market Street 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA
June 23 – 25, 2006 – BarCampSanFrancisco – at Microsoft Offices, One Market Street 2nd Floor, San Francisco, CA
June 29 – July 01, 2006 – Gnomedex 6.0 – at Bell Harbor International Conference Center, 2211 Alaskan Way, Seattle, WA

(And yes, you can add these events to your calendar easily.)

Oh, and cool sidenote, Senator John Edwards will be keynoting Gnomedex. Guess if you can’t get the inventor of the internets, you can at least get a running mate.

Change is good

In case you missed it (and I don’t really blog too much about personal stuff much, but it’s okay to be a little human once and again), Tara and Riya have bid each other their farewells and both are moving on to the next chapters of their storied Web 2.0 lives. Not unlike a certain fella you may know. Hmmh. Funny, n’est-ce pas?

We also packed up most of my stuff from Teh Langpad this weekend and moved it over to Tara’s place where I’ve pretty much been livin’ anyway. But yeah. Ho boy.

And, as you know, Teh Space is off and running. Like, a real workspace (but it’s still not the same as finally having something of a home). But still.

Oh, and tomorrow I leave for France until Sunday. Yowza.

And did I mention Picoformats (shuddup, yes I am serious)?

Well, anyway, this whole post is really about Tara and how brave she is to be going out on her own in all this. There’s a lot that she has to figure out, but even more opportunity that she needs to figure out how to make the most of it… I’m proud to be her PiC and to watch eagerly as she ponders her next steps and where she’ll lead the Pinko Brigades from this point onward.

I’ll tell you one thing, it only gets more interesting from here.

Egg, meet chicken

For all you nay-sayers out there waiting for some reason to implement microformats, you now have no excuse.

Not only can you search for microformats (like my hcard — search for “messina“) but you can also submit your content for indexing to the newly launched Pingerati site. The search so far covers hCard, hCalendar and hReview… and I’m hoping to get more conversations kicked off around better interfaces for microformats as well as more practical ways of implementing and making use of microformats (like Jeremy Keith’s austin.adactio.com page).

In any case, we finally have a use besides filling your address book for all those conference speaker pages that Tantek has converted!

Scrambled, thoughts

Microformats capture creativity. It inspires imagination.

Those things which inspire rethinking what’s possible generate energy.

Tools that succeed enable the harnessing of that potential power.

. . .

Blue Bottle Coffee is magical.

. . .

My Blackberry has increased my productivity elevenfold.

I need more elevenfold productivity increases.

. . .

How will we deal with the deluge of information raining down upon us?

The torrent is upon us, those of us beneath the wave are struggling for air; sucking it out of each other’s lungs.

. . .

What is the cost of perspective?

. . .

If I were Steven Colbert’s mum, I would be extremely proud.

Out of Towner Meetup: Teh Boris & ClaimID

Everyone’s favorite hand waver, Boris Mann of Bryght is here as well and Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell of ClaimID for Startup School and IIW and are huuuuungry!

It’s last minute, I know, but if you can make it to tonight’s Out of Towner at Osha Thai at 7:30pm you can expect some great food and very captivating conversation!

…specifically:

Identity 2.0
Drupal
Microformats
NP Tech
Coworking
Open source
…other yadda yadda!

Ok, c u there. Kbai!

Announcing: 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

Chris 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.

Upcoming updates

More updates from Upcoming, including the addition of hcards to all the event pages! w00t!

PBWiki hits 50,000 wikis

Hometown hero PBWiki (created by a small team of folks lead by David Weekly of SHDH 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?