Microformats and the Future of Syndication

AdaptiveWave

Microformats and
The Future of Syndication
Nate Aune
AdaptiveWave, LLC
CM Pros Summit, San Francisco
Apr. 23, 2006

CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836

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Agenda

• Introduction
• Applications
• CMSes
• Questions


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Nate Aune
• Founder & Chief Technologist, AdaptiveWave, LLC.

• B.A. Computer Science & Music Minor,
Paciﬁc Lutheran University (1991-94),
Berklee College of Music (1997-99)

• Boston Plone Users Group (Founder)

• Plone Foundation (Member)

• Content Management Professionals (Member)

• Frequent Speaker at non-proﬁt and technology conferences

• Grassroots Use of Technology ‘05/06, Plone Symposium
‘05/06, EuroPython 2005, Plone Conference 2005

AdaptiveWave

AdaptiveWave, LLC.
• Hosted content management solutions (on-demand Plone)

• Other Services

• Content Management Systems consulting

• Intranet / Knowledge Management / Document Management

• Development, training, support, hosting

• Company

• Ofﬁces in Boston, Sacramento and Canada

• international network of partners


AdaptiveWave

Content is king
• Content published to website
• must visit website (limited audience)
• Content published as RSS feed can be:
• syndicated to other websites
• viewed in RSS reader / aggregator
• pushed to mobile devices
• sent to email inbox

AdaptiveWave


AdaptiveWave

RSS lessons

• Content wants to be free
• Presentation is less important than
substance
• Really Simple Syndication really is simple


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Limitations of RSS
• Limited metadata
• only Title, description, URL
• No way to give the data meaning
• what kind of item is this?
• a link is a link is a link
• No way to integrate this data into my
existing tools (Bookmarks, Addressbook,
Calendar)

AdaptiveWave
Example: event listing


AdaptiveWave

Syndicating events
• Using RSS feed
• provides title, description and url
• but not the critical info such as:
• date / time
• location
• important metadata is:
• embedded in the description
• not easily parseable by tools

AdaptiveWave

Microformats intro
• Microformats solve a common problem:
• data in HTML is easily understood by
humans but difﬁcult for tools to parse
• Microformats are:
• based on open standards
• a way to structure data in an XHTML page
• structured so that data can be easily
parsed by tools

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Building blocks of
microformats


AdaptiveWave

Concrete example:
What a human sees...
The next CM Pros Summit will be held on April 23-24, at
Sheraton Palace Hotel, 2 Montgomery St. San Francisco,
CA 94105


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What a tool sees...
The next
<span class=”vevent”>
<a class=”url” href=”http://www.cmprofessionals.org”>
<span class=”summary”>CM Pros Summit</span>
</a>
will be held on
<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”20060423T1300”>April 23</abbr>-
<abbr class=”dtend” title=” 20060423T1900”>24</abbr>, at
<span class=”location”>Sheraton Palace Hotel, 2
Montgomery St. San Francisco, CA 94105</span>
</span>


AdaptiveWave

Structured data
hCalendar microformat
• Highlighted CSS classes identify this data as:
• belonging to hCalendar microformat
• intentionally similar to the iCalendar
format
• allow easy conversion between the two

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Conversion
• Convert pages with microformatted data to
other popular formats
• hCalendar -> iCalendar
• hCard -> vCard


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Interoperability
• Can then be imported into:
• familiar desktop apps
• Outlook, iCal, Address Book
• emerging web-based services
• Google calendar


AdaptiveWave

hCard microformat

• Represents a person or organization
• Specify relationship to another person using
XFN (XHTML Friends Network)
• Easy conversion to vCard for import into
desktop apps


AdaptiveWave

My hCard
<div class=quot;vcardquot;>
<a class=quot;email fnquot;
href=quot;mailto:nate.aune@adaptivewave.comquot;>Nate Aune</a>
<div class=quot;telquot;>+1-617-820-5113</div>
<div class=quot;titlequot;>Chief Technologist</div>
<div class=”org”>AdaptiveWave, LLC.</div>
</div>

Make your own hCard at
http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator


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Example
hCard


AdaptiveWave

hCard converted to vCard


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Applications
How microformats are being used
Flock, Meetup.com, Upcoming.org, Kritx, SimplyHired


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Flock: Emerging browser
• Auto-detect microformats on a webpage
• Utilize structured data to aggregate and
contextualize favorite content:
• events
• people
• reviews
• multimedia: music, video, photos

AdaptiveWave

Who’s using microformats?
• Meetup.com - hCalendar
• Yahoo
• Upcoming.org - hCalendar
• yahoo.co.uk - hReview
• Microsoft
• LiveClipboard - hCard and hCalendar
• Eventful.com / EVDB - 100,000 events/venues

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Beyond technology
companies
• Avon.com
• 40,000+ agents - contact info as hCards
• University of Bath
• thousands of contacts
• SimplyHired
• Using hResume to aggregate job seekers’
resumes

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Beneﬁts of microformats
• hCard - peer to peer contact sharing
• hCalendar - peer to peer event subscribing
• As with RSS, this depends on:
• Publishing tools (CMSes?)
• and Aggregating tools
• Addressbook and Calendar apps

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Integration with CMSes
A look at Wordpress and Plone


AdaptiveWave

Structured blogging
• Normal blog post
• no structured data
• Structured blog post
• machine readable format
• other services can understand it
• web services
• search engines
• aggregators

AdaptiveWave

Wordpress
• Structured Blogging plug-in for Wordpress
• Lets you make structured posts about:
• events
• reviews
• audio/video


AdaptiveWave

Structured Blogging
Beneﬁts
• Give bloggers tools to create & syndicate
stuctured info such as events and reviews
• Leverages the decentralized nature of blogs
• Aggregators: Exposes data in blogs to
aggregators such as edgeio.com
• Web services: add your friend’s calendar
entries to your datebook


AdaptiveWave

Plone
• content management system built on top of
Zope and written in Python
• open source (GPL license)
• used by NASA, Motorola, Nokia, HP, Disney,
Creative Commons, FSF, Oxfam
• uses templating language called ZPT (Zope
Page Templates)


AdaptiveWave

hCalendar support in Plone
• Only had to modify two ﬁles:
• events listing template
folder_listing.pt

• event view template
event_view.pt

• All done at the XHTML level
• No low level coding necessary

AdaptiveWave

hCard support in Plone
• Only two ﬁles to modify:
• Member listing template
member_search_results.pt

• Author proﬁle page
author.cpt


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Microformats summary
• solve a speciﬁc problem
• start as simple as possible
• design for humans ﬁrst, machines second
• reuse building blocks from widely adopted
standards (i.e. iCalendar, vCard)
• modularity / embeddability
• enable and encourage decentralized
development, content, services

AdaptiveWave

Don’t be a
beached seal

Use microformats!

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Thanks!


AdaptiveWave

More info / credits
• Microformats - http://www.microformats.org
• Structured Blogging - http://www.structuredblogging.org
• Tantek Celik - presentation on Microformats
http://tantek.com/presentations/2006/03/microformats-sxsw/
http://tantek.com/presentations/2005/12/syndicate-microformats/

• RSS Networks for Learning and Innovation
http://www.ottergroup.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/16/1233232.html

• Converters (hCard to vCard, hCalendar to iCal)
• suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/

• feeds.technorati.com/events/ and feeds.technorati.com/contacts/

•

AdaptiveWave

This presentation is
archived at:

http://www.jazkarta.com/presentations/microformats.pdf


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