Microformats and the Future of Syndication

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

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Microformats andThe Future of Syndication

Nate AuneAdaptiveWave, LLC

CM Pros Summit, San FranciscoApr. 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

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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

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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

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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)

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Example: event listing

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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

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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

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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>

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Structured datahCalendar 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

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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

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My hCard

<div class="vcard"> <a class="email fn" href="mailto:nate.aune@adaptivewave.com">Nate Aune</a> <div class="tel">+1-617-820-5113</div> <div class="title">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

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hCard converted to vCard

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ApplicationsHow 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

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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 CMSesA look at Wordpress and Plone

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Structured blogging• Normal blog post

• no structured data

• Structured blog post

• machine readable format

• other services can understand it

• web services

• search engines

• aggregators

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Wordpress• Structured Blogging plug-in for Wordpress

• Lets you make structured posts about:

• events

• reviews

• audio/video

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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

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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)

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hCalendar support in Plone• Only had to modify two files:

• events listing templatefolder_listing.pt

• event view templateevent_view.pt

• All done at the XHTML level

• No low level coding necessary

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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

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Don’t be a beached seal

Use microformats!

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Thanks!

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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 Innovationhttp://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/

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This presentation is archived at:

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

Microformats and the Future of Syndication

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