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microformats everywhere + live data web

Good to see Conor O'Neill is pretty excited with the realization that this Event plugin enables WIndows Live Writer to publish hCalendar formatted events. hCalendar is one of the microformats.

"Create your own events or find existing events through intergrated search of the Eventful.com website. Format the event, add a picture, edit the description, customize what data is displayed. The published post included correct hCalendar microformatting. The plugin also enables pastes of Live Clipboard copied events and Blog This of events from the Eventful.com website"

Note here that the Eventful.com piece here is not required, you can just publish a microformatted event on your blog post / page. Simply put, the pluin provides a form that when published renders the content in an open standard forma - hCalendar.

He also notes that tagging is supported too - rel-tag is a microformat, you know, the one that has been applied to around 50% of all blog posts. Microformats are everywhere! (Conor, btw, the fact that microformats is now supported by LiveWriter was blogged: see Peter Van Dijck and Don Dodge. :-)

Tom Raftery has been playing and James Corbett seems to be grokking the power of the Live Clipboard + RSS + SSE + microformats (mRc) concept. To quote myself:

"The mRc combo isn't just about copy and pasting static structured data into microformat-aware webpages and clients (though this on its own would pretty powerful stuff). The RSS piece brings with it the magic of 'liveness' to the data - the really simple magic of subscription. The point being that if the original data source changes, it changes at the destination (the subscriber). mRc makes dynamic data links - hence the 'Live' Clipboard name."

If you are wondering what all this microformats business is all about, check out this podcast.

Posted: Oct 04 2006, 08:10 AM by alexbarnett | with 6 comment(s)
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Comments

Conor O'Neill said:

Hey Alex,

Thanks for the mention but just a few points.

First I said that I was "very excited" which is genuinely reflects how I feel about this.

Second, I'm building a business around microformats so I'm well aware of the situation with how they are published, I was explaining to my readers about the mechanics of it. Not all my readers are as deeply in the know as yourself.

Third, whilst you may know that rel-tag is a microformat, many of the people in a room at BarCamp Ireland on Saturday to whom I gave a talk on microformats, did not. That is my target audience, not you. I also brought up rel-tag because in the previous version of Live Writer they were only supported via Tim Heuer's plug-in.

I'm sorry I missed Peter's post, I have a Technorati search feed for "microformats" not "live writer" and he did not tag his post with microformats. The reason I missed it on Dan's is that he mentioned Eventful integration (which is nice) rather than microformat publishing and Live Clipboard (which is huge).

Conor O'Neill

# October 4, 2006 1:09 PM

orcmid said:

This is getting very interesting.  LiveWriter that is.  Now if they give me a way to make trackbacks easily, I'll be in heaven.

# October 4, 2006 2:11 PM

alexbarnett said:

Conor,

>"Not all my readers are as deeply in the know as yourself."

nor mine, that's why I pointed it out :-)

re: rel-tag - it is amazing how popular it has become...again, I'm just pointing out its popularity to my readers for same reason as above :-)

-

I've got to do some work on my tone it seems: I didn't mean to 'have a go' at all, just wanted an excuse to blog about microformats again...

Keep up the evangelism!

Alex.

--

Dennis (orcmid):

I'm not sure Live Writer could ever make trackbacks easier for you: it's a server side thing...oh - hold on...I think I know what you mean: some sort of third party webservice that crawls the web, that is called and dynamically publishes inbound links on the published post. Is that what you mean? Cool idea...

# October 4, 2006 3:28 PM

Conor O'Neill said:

Oh it started badly when you spelled my name incorrectly  :-)

I'm looking forward to you writing more about mRc now that some of the tools to support it are starting to appear. I read your original article back in May and loved it.

Conor

# October 5, 2006 12:16 AM

alexbarnett said:

Conor - mispelling names is a speciality of mine. Will correct, thanks.

# October 5, 2006 8:47 AM

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