Led by microformats guru Tantek Celik (CTO of Technorati) and including Chris Messina of Flock, Mark Norman Francis of Yahoo! UK and Jeremy Keith, this panel provided an overview of microformats and gave examples of how they can be applied. Tantek posted all of his presentation notes online and blogged his own summary of the event, so I will be quite brief in explanation. But basically, microformats provide a means to standardize data on the web that is not yet standardized. It is attempting to do for random bits of data (movie reviews, contact information, concert listings, etc) what RSS has done for text articles by standardizing the meta-data that defines the given item and making the data universally accessible. So, for example, the microformat for contact information, called "hCard", universally standardized the HTML that one uses to denote Name, Address, URL, Email, etc, within the page code. For a better high-level overview than I can give, I will again point you to the microformats.org site. But the takeaway is that microformats will help expose data that is currently locked into unstandardized HTML code so that people can use it for mashups, syndication, and other means of simplified data importing/exporting into various programs. For example, if Yahoo! Address Book, Outlook and MySpace all supported and organized contacts via microformats, you could easily merge all three address lists into one in order to have a master address file. Another tangible example for microformats use was given by Jeremy Keith, who showed you Yahoo! UK Movies currently supports the hReview microformat such that anyone can access and reuse the movie reviews and access the data in a unified way. Jeremy Keith showed how he had created a mashup using Google Maps API and the microformats-supported events data in Upcoming.org to map out his SXSW evening activities (link).
You can now download the Tails extension for Firefox, or download the Flock browser, and both support microformats. That way, if you are on a web page that supports microformats, you can easily access the raw, microformat-supported data from the page.
I welcome any comments below by folks more intimately familiar with the subject than I, as today was very much a learning experience for me.
Technorati tags: SXSW, SXSWi, SXSWi06, SXSW06, microformats
