RasterWeb!

As previously mentioned, I gave a presentation on Microformats to the Milwaukee Web Design Meetup Group. I think it went well… I talked for about 30-40 minutes while running through some slides and examples, and showed Pingerati and Technorati’s new Microformats Search, as well as the Firefox Tails Extension.

The slides for the presentation are online now, aptly titled Microformats.

This was my first time using S5, and it wasn’t perfect, but part of that may be due to my use of a borrowed Windows laptop. S5 is very cool though, and I’m sure it’ll only get better.

It was nice to discuss Microformats with folks who had never heard of them before. They came up with some neat ideas about how they could be used in the future. I’m hoping at least a few people were motivated enough to create their own hCard.

Oh, I should send thanks to Tantek Çelik and Ryan King. I borrowed most of the slides from them. ;)

(Argh! I completely forgot that I had PDFs to hand out.)

The May 2006 Web Design Meetup was fun, but a few folks mentioned that having a bit more focus might be nice, so I’ve volunteered to talk about Microformats at the meeting on June 8th, 2006.

If you’re not familiar with Microformats, I’ll try to cover the basics. Here’s a simple definition from microformats.org:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Basically, Microformats allow you to markup pages so people and computers can easily get information from them. Come with questions and I’ll try to supply answers.

Last summer I wanted to start a worm farm, thinking it would be a fun project for the kids, and a way to have worms available for fishing, but we never actually got around to building the farm. Well this year, we have…

We are now worm farmers.

I had a few pages I bookmarked on how to build a worm farm, though most of them focused on the composting/recycling aspect rather than “worms for fishing” which is the kind my Dad and I built when I was a kid. Anyway, I sort of did things my own way, based on what I read, and the farm is now operational.

I took my old van box, cut it into two pieces that were stackable, drilled holes, added a screen, wet newspaper, egg shells, asparagus, dirt, and worms… and it’s now in the basement. We added about two dozen redworms and probably 20 to 30 “regular” worms from the garden out back. As this is our first attempt, it’s pretty experimental, so all we can do is hope for the best. Expect an update soon…

I’ve started videoblogging one year ago at tinkernet and so far I’ve really been enjoying it.

I’ve posted 70 videos since May of 2005, and I’m sure I’ll post more in the future. I’m not sure if anyone else enjoys the videos I create, but I do, and that’s all that matters. I’m not trying to catapult “citizen journalism” into the public eye, or document any significant events, I’m just “showing moments” as Jay says…

I’ve also met (virtually) a lot of really cool and creative people who have great ideas about video on the web, and how to better the whole experience. If you’re interested, check out the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group.

I’m sorry to say I’ll be missing Vloggercon. If you get a chance to attend, I highly recommend it. If you miss it, don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of video from the event online…

Tantek talks about the Microformats Search that Techorati just released. This is totally cool! Microformats are just gonna explode on the web in the next year.

I’ve been (silently) trying to introduce Microformats to many of the sites I’m involved with, including ocono.com. I was also able to add it to the last large project I worked on for a b2b company as well. It’s not hard, as it’s really just adding CSS class names appropriately.

Microformats have had a bit of the chicken/egg problem, why bother using them if there are not (many) tools that can consume them? My suggestion is to start using Microformats today, because it’s so damn easy, and if you’re lucky (which you will be) the payoff will happen later as more and more tools support them. Small costs upfront yielding large returns later. It’s a win-win situation.

So use Microformats, tell Pingerati, and then sit back and wait…