A mother of a microformats tool

For a while now I’ve been on about microformats and how useful they can be. What was lacking up to now is the TOOLS to make them useful! Here is a handy-dandy one. So Paul and Victoire, I guess you’ll be installing it soon? You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/4106/

Introducing Operator! The mother of all tools. Operator is a Firefox/Flock extension that will recognize the following microformats on a page and enable you to do something worthwhile with them:

• hCard - contact information
• hCalendar - events
• geo - location
• hReview - formal reviews
• tag - tagwords
• hResume - Your CV
• xFolk - bookmarks

I’ll be going into more detail on each item later.

What it does:

It parses the web page you are on and if it finds any of the above microformats, it will highlight the relevant toolbar button and offer you something you can do with it.
For example:

If you have Technorati tags on your page, it will highlight the Flickr, del.icio.us and Technorati buttons. If you click on one of these buttons it will drop down with all the tag words it found. If you are in say the del.icio.us button and you click on one of the tag words, it will search del.icio.us for the selected tag word. Same for Flickr and Technorati.

Another GREAT feature is that if it find an hCalendar event, you can click the Google Calendar button and stick the event straight into your Google Calendar.

Or if it finds a hCard on the site, you can click the Export Contact button and it will save the contact in your Outlook Address book if you use Outlook! Nifty (as Mike would say!).

It is still early days for this extension, but it is sure to grow in popularity and extend as time goes by! So all we need to do is to start implementing damn microformats!

technorati tags:microformats, semanticweb, firefox, flock, operator, extensions

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7 Comments to "A mother of a microformats tool"

• Imel said: On 03/28/2007 at 9:30 am

  Thanks Stii for finding and bringing us usefull stuff.
  I have installed Operator and am already reaping the benefits.

• Miguel dos Santos said: On 03/28/2007 at 12:41 pm

  Neato.
  I also came across another firefox plugin a while back, that does real-time semantic processing on webpages. So it basically extracts all occurrences of places, people, organisations, addresses, etc and summarizes it in the sidebar, or when turned on, on hovering your mouse over the highlighted items, which then pops up with more information on that item.
  Anywho, the plugin is called Gnosis (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3999)
  I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, but it’s also pretty cool if you ask me.

• Paul Jacobson said: On 03/30/2007 at 6:00 am

  That is a pretty awesome tool Stii. I am still using Safari so I’ll wait for the next version of Firefox and give the Mozilla flagship another try then (I am downloading the beta of Flock for the Mac now to try out).

• links for 2007-03-31 at Wired Gecko said: On 03/31/2007 at 5:28 am

  [...] stii.za.net » Blog Archive » A mother of a microformats tool Great tool for Firefox or Flock which picks up various microformats and presents you with the appropriate options. (tags: microformats flock firefox hcard technorati del.icio.us operator) [...]

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Go2SA full of Microformat goodness said: On 05/04/2007 at 10:12 am

  [...] btw, for the guys that have the Operator+ Firefox/Flock Plugin: If you go to Go2SA and you go into an event, you’ll be able to save it [...]

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » Ok, Flock wins! said: On 07/16/2007 at 7:54 pm

  [...] the guys doing the Operator+ plug-in just need to look at why my favorite microformats plug-in is not working so funky [...]

• stii.za.net » Blog Archive » A good example of the Semantic Web (a.k.a. Web 3.0 ugh…) said: On 03/19/2008 at 10:48 am

  [...] it would be until the big guns start adopting it. Finally, Paul told me, that Yahoo adopted some microformats in a big way! Exciting news! Paul, you asked what I thought and I think it is FANTASTIC! Now it is [...]

Spit it out!

Filed in: Flocking, Semantic Web, firefox, flock by: Stii