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 AdaptiveWave Agenda • Introduction • Applications • CMSes • Questions CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave 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 www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) 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 www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave RSS lessons • Content wants to be free • Presentation is less important than substance • Really Simple Syndication really is simple CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) existing tools (Bookmarks, Addressbook, Calendar) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 Example: event listing AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave • 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) Syndicating events www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave • Microformats solve a common problem: • data in HTML is easily understood by humans but difficult for tools to parse Microformats intro • 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Building blocks of microformats CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave What a tool sees... The next CM Pros Summit will be held on April 2324, at Sheraton Palace Hotel, 2 Montgomery St. San Francisco, CA 94105 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Conversion • Convert pages with microformatted data to other popular formats • hCalendar -> iCalendar • hCard -> vCard CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Interoperability • Can then be imported into: • familiar desktop apps • Outlook, iCal, Address Book • emerging web-based services • Google calendar CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave hCard microformat • Represents a person or organization • Specify relationship to another person using XFN (XHTML Friends Network) desktop apps • Easy conversion to vCard for import into CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave My hCard Make your own hCard at http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Example hCard CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave hCard converted to vCard CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Applications How microformats are being used Flock, Meetup.com, Upcoming.org, Kritx, SimplyHired CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave • Avon.com • 40,000+ agents - contact info as hCards • University of Bath • thousands of contacts • SimplyHired • Using hResume to aggregate job seekers’ resumes CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 Beyond technology companies AdaptiveWave 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Integration with CMSes A look at Wordpress and Plone CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave • Normal blog post • no structured data • Structured blog post • machine readable format • other services can understand it • web services • search engines • aggregators CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) Structured blogging www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Wordpress • Structured Blogging plug-in for Wordpress • Lets you make structured posts about: • events • reviews • audio/video CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Structured Blogging Benefits • Give bloggers tools to create & syndicate aggregators such as edgeio.com entries to your datebook stuctured info such as events and reviews • Leverages the decentralized nature of blogs • Aggregators: Exposes data in blogs to • Web services: add your friend’s calendar CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 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 Page Templates) • uses templating language called ZPT (Zope CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave hCard support in Plone • Only two files to modify: • Member listing template member_search_results.pt • Author profile page author.cpt CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave 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 CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Don’t be a beached seal Use microformats! CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave Thanks! CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave • 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/ More info / credits • RSS Networks for Learning and Innovation • Converters (hCard to vCard, hCalendar to iCal) http://www.ottergroup.com/blog/_archives/2005/9/16/1233232.html CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) • • • suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/ feeds.technorati.com/events/ and feeds.technorati.com/contacts/ www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836 AdaptiveWave This presentation is archived at: http://www.jazkarta.com/presentations/microformats.pdf CM Pros Summit.(4/23/06) www.adaptivewave.com (866) 418-2836