an ordinary blog — andr3.net

Whenever I'm discussing the concept of microformats, one of the most recurring questions is:

What's in it for me??

If you're a publisher, the answer you're looking for is in the answer to the question What's in it for the users?. You'll enable your users to extract semantic meaning and take it wherever they want. If your company has an ecosystem of services, like Google has, they can take your semantic data – as well as data from the entire interweb – and inject it on your own services (Google Calendar, for example).
To top it off, it's not even that hard to implement. But I won't go there today.

So I thought it would be interesting if I had somewhere to point to when I wanted to show someone how great this is from the user perspective. So I made a screencast, available down below.

Before you jump at me for not using the most used browser at the moment, let me just go out and say this: I used Mozilla Firefox and the Operator extension by IBM's Michael Kalpy. But please, bear in mind that this issue is being followed closely by the fellows over at Mozilla and Firefox 3, the next grand release, will support this out-of-the-box! That's a huge, tech-savvy crowd with easy access to these features.

IMHO, the rest of the browser vendors won't be allowed to take much longer. Microformats are here to stay and they have some heavywheight entities backing them up. For more on this, read this post: Microformats: getting mainstream? by Pedro Custódio.
Also, even if you-know-who doesn't give a crap about this, there's plenty of toolbars going around. One of them is bound to start supporting this. My money is on Google's, but feel free to prove me wrong guys.

Enough babble, let's just jump straight to the video...

Screencast: What's in it for me?

http://screencast.com/t/lcf6aShStSu

Sorry for not having an embeddable flash screencast. Maybe next time.

Related Links

• microformats.org - everything you need to know.
• Operator extension for Firefox
• Tails Export extension for Firefox
• Join the discussion!