Congrats to Tantek and Rohit - (both smiling)
Andy Baio is Yahoo announced that Yahoo will be eating that big red pill and supporting microfomrats in a big way. No surprise there - Andy’s upComing.org was one of the first systems to ever support microfomrats.
Brian Dear was there too - throwing his support to microformats (via Eventful.) All of this is GREAT NEWS!
Congrats dudes (and any dudesses who might also have been there.)
Maybe now we can have giant shared XML databases - for all to use - stock full of events (that are beign scraped from Craigslist anyway.)
But I don’t have to throw cold water on the situation to point out that there is no such thing as a permalink that isolates one chunk of microformat. And there’s no autodiscovery. I know this is an area that is being discussed (as well as the notion of ScrapePIs) which is all coolio - but the continued proselytization of the term microformats - is bound to confuse end-users when they ask “where is my subscription feed to my events?”
That’s why we created StructuredBliogging.org - as a vehicle to BOTH support microformats - btu also fill in some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. SB.org also provides comprehensive plugins for Wordpress and Moveable Type.
However with the demise (and inevitable dissolution of PubSub) it looks like Dave Sifry’s stampeding marketing efforts have won.
The world is not necessarily a better place with ONLY microformats. Technorati has their kitchen in place, but lets make sure that they’re ’sharing’ in that kitchen’s results. But that’s not enough.
Microformats is xHTML ONLY, and last I looked the world is not ONLYxHTML.
IMHO
Whether or not there’s ever any more versions of StructuredBlogging produced - we’ll continue to support the notion and ship it with our products. We’ve been fixing bugs and expanding the scope - but additional funding will be required - as last I looked - nobody is handing us $10M VC rounds.
We pay for everything out of our own bootstrapped pockets - but we felt so strongly that microformats LIMITED our future - that we spent allot of time and energy both supporting microformats as well as filling in the missing pieces.
Our decision to align ourselves with PubSub may have proven wrong, but at least nobody can say we’re in Dave Sifry and Joi Ito’s hip poket.
June 22nd, 2006 at 10:25 am
This is certainly a good thing and major accomplishment, regardless of what you call it.
In fact, Tara and I discussed avoiding the controversy over the whole “PINKO” name by renaming it FART.
If “microformats” doesn’t work for you, “Structured Blogging” won’t work for someone else, so why don’t we call it FART as well? And yes, we should rename AJAX to FART also, just to keep the trend alive.
Point is this: regardless of who delt it, Yahoo! and many others have now smelt it and are doing something with it. The bigger questions is, especially for PeopleAggregator, is what to do with it now that we’ve got this massive data store — in XHTML or whatever.
But let’s face facts, browsers have done poorly rendering anything but XHTML (with a little RSS and ATOM thrown in lately). There no consistency on SVG, on VRML, on XML, or even on RSS! But you *can* click on a link on a webpage and have something happen… and you can right click on an image and save it to your desktop. With microformats, now we have to figure out what kind of behaviors and interactions make sense in order to bring the benefits of these structures that we’re all so gaga about out to normal folks who seriously could care less about all the FARTing out in Silicon Valley.
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:02 am
Ok, boys — let’s not confuse the reader with another form of abbreviation. I think the convention is (X)HTML
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:05 am
As for identifying a specific piece of microformatted content on a page, what’s wrong with good, old id attribute?
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:50 am
[…] Chris Messina left this comment: This is certainly a good thing and major accomplishment, regardless of what you call it. […]
June 22nd, 2006 at 11:58 am
Marc,
It’s not fair to say that Microformats belong to Technorati btw. It’s a community based effort…and while we are working together you will learn the importance of not fighting community based movements. This is the key to what I do, Marc. It is about keeping it real. Things don’t fail by accident.
Chris and I as a team will do what we can to make certain that everyone plays nice to benefit the group that deserves more - the end user. That’s the side we are on.
Tara
June 22nd, 2006 at 1:30 pm
[…] It’s been an unfortunately common misconception that Structured Blogging and Microformats are competitors. Now, even Marc Canter whose company hired me to work on Structured Blogging late last year, has fallen into the trap of thinking this way when he says “However with the demise (and inevitable dissolution of PubSub) it looks like Dave Sifry’s stampeding marketing efforts have won.”. How can they win when they’re not even competeting? I’ll lay it out in simple terms here. […]
June 22nd, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Marc please read this http://www.kstaken.com/archives/46_microformats-and-structured-blogging-are-not-competitors.html
June 22nd, 2006 at 2:57 pm
Where/when is that picture from? That’s undeniably a Wharton School podium.
June 22nd, 2006 at 3:44 pm
[…] Kimbro Staken makes many correct statements and declares a new beginning for StructuredBlogging.org - but before I just completely just take back everything I just said, let me point out some cold hard facts: […]
June 23rd, 2006 at 8:16 am
Marc, if you “aligned” yourself with PubSub, you made a mistake. You were supposed to be “aligned” with the idea of Structured Blogging. The reason we hired you and your team to build and champion the Structured Blogging plugins and tools was that we wanted to avoid the kind of competitivenes that we felt was inevitable. In order to reduce the opportunity for stupid and wasteful inter-company fighting, we intentionally moved PubSub into the background and supported others who would champion the idea. From the very beginnings of the project, it was made clear that *ALL* formats should be supported. What we were looking for was a way to move away from sterile debates over unimplemented formats and move the focus instead to the construction of tools and applications that could bring to users the benefits of structured content and Structured Blogging. As I’ve said on numerous occaisions, Structured Blogging is a thing you do. It is not about formats.
One of my biggest regrets about the demise of PubSub is that we won’t be able to continue supporting you and others in building the tools that are needed to make Structured Blogging (or even “microformats”) successful and useful. If the Structured Blogging effort falters due to our demise, it is likely that we won’t see much more out of Technorati and micro-formats “community effort” than we’ve seen so far — more formats with very few useful implementations. This is not what the user community deserves or needs. We should be focusing on tools — not formats. Formats are for geeks and academics. Tools are for users…
In any case, I’d like to thank you, Kimbro, Phil, Raju, and all the others who have put time and effort into making Structured Blogging as successful as it has become. Of course, I wish for more success in bringing these tools to the hands of users, but what has been accomplished already is goodness. Thanks for all you’ve done.
bob wyman
June 26th, 2006 at 5:00 am
I have to admit that talk of coding languages etc. throws me (so “why are you here?” I hear you ask!) but as an end-user and someone who is always on the lookout for ways to enhance my business or gain advantages, this post is symptomatic of so many reasons why we are walking a technology tight-rope.
Wiki, blog, web 2.0, microformats, bullshit 2.0…give it a name if it makes you feel better, but ultimately, what does it mean the the end user? F*** All.
How does Soccer Mom Sandy or her family make use of (X)html, do they really care whether they use Atom or RSS 2.0? NO.
It is the responsibility of the developers to sell the benefits of what these technologies do that will grow the net, not the titles that we give them.
This is where Yahoo! are currently so far ahead of the game IMHO. They turn technology that is being talked about above and turn it into something that everydayjoe (not factoryjoe, ’cause he’s as smart as hell!!) can understand the benefits of. No teminology, just benefits.
Maybe I’ve missed the point and that this conversation is developer-only and not meant to circulate in the “household” public domain, but I am beginning to wonder if development is advancing at such a pace, everybody is forgetting why we (sorry, YOU!) are all developing products for.
Is the speedy development and subsequent take-up of technology by geeks (not used derogatively BTW) going at such a pace that the masses are not getting a chance to benefit?