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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Flocking, Semantic Web, firefox, flock Stii
Microformats and the future of Google (a practical example)
So now that you all know exactly what microformats is (read: Web3.0 (The Semantic Web) building blocks), it is time to look at some of the practical benefits thereof.
Before I start, I should mention that Google is actually a slow adopter of the technology. They probably have good reason for not adopting the technology yet, but if you look at the benefits below, I really hope they change their minds soon! Yahoo! Local support it already, so I’ll play with it and do another post later when time allows for it. (Unfortunately, Yahoo! Local does not include much of Africa…)
So lets take the analogy of the 27dinner with their events published in the hCalendar microformat format. 
We add a new microformat called hReview which is used by all the Uber Geeks blogging about 27dinners. (From the microformats site: hReview is a simple, open, distributed format,suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses,events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is oneof several microformats open standards.)
Google now indexes the web sites and sees, “w00t! Here is some microformats on this page! Better save it somewhere special…” So it picks out the formatted data and stores it for use in their microformat search engine page. (Lets just make believe that they have a thing called microformats.google.com, since there is not such a thing yet, its only MAKE BELIEVE! Clear? Right!)
So you have heard of this thing called 27dinners and want to know a little more. You go over to microformats.google.com and you enter 27dinner. Instead of returning all other blog’s results with 27dinner in it, it will return only the results formatted. It could return a page with subcategories for formal reviews about the past 27dinners and a subcategory listing future events of the 27dinners. If it really wants to be fancy, Google will allow you to save the future 27dinner events there-and-then to your Google Calendar so you don’t double book for that date and all that without even typing anything but your search words.
In other words, microformats will allow Google to UNDERSTAND that the event details on the page is an EVENT and that REVIEWS on other’s blogs is formal REVIEWS and not random rants of how good or bad the events was or simply someone that said, “Hey, Killroy was here (at the 27dinner)”.
Oh and before I forget, my favorite browser Flock has a cool microformats extension called Flocktails. Go and install Flock then install the extension and check it out!
technorati tags:microformats, web3.0, semanticweb, rdf, google, yahoo, 27dinner
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Flocking, Semantic Web, Techie stuff, Web 2.0, ideas 2.0, web development Stii
