Cory Doctorow: When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

Winner of the 2007 Locus Award for best novelette.

Flowers from both my rose and cutting gardens.

‘ve been reading Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 and I’m about halfway through the book. I’m fairly excited about the idea of the semantic web and putting meaning behind ordinary web pages (and the html markup behind them). I think microformats used by people to start to include that meaning. Indeed, many existing websites, such as Technorati and Flickr, already use them. My major concern is that microformats still seem to be a geek phenomenon for the most part – except for websites that embed them automatically (and usually transparently) as part of their functionality. There are a few outside sites that have been built to make it easier to add microformats to your content, usually by providing the markup to add to your page, but they still require that you have access to the behind-the-scenes markup (for the most part).

So how to we make microformats more accessible? I think the obvious answer is that we need to web 2.0 them and create gadgets/widgets which allow people to add them without even knowing if they should use rel or rev. Hopefully more web 2.0 websites include microformats behind the scenes in their own functionality as well.

What good are having microformats on the page if visitors don’t know what they’re for? Operator, the Firefox extension, has addressed this somewhat by creating a toolbar that allows you to interact with certain microformats on the page with certain applications and websites. I think before microformats become mainstream, we need to see this completely integrated into all the browsers (Firefox promises this in a future version) and also have some type of built-in functionality that allows you to click on the microformated content and have the context dictate the services offered.

These aren’t necessarily new ideas, but I wanted to share my opinions which popped up while reading the book (and also the Microformats website).

Technorati tags: microformats, web 2.0

I am currently working on a personal project, which should be ready to be made public in a couple of weeks. It is pretty exciting for me because it allows me to get back to my roots and do what I enjoy – and do it for me instead of for someone else. I’ll try to post little tidbits here and there…. stay tuned.

Went to the BNL (Bare Naked Ladies) Concert last night at Pine Knob. It was a great concert – they really are good live with great stage presence and personality. (Now if we could just get rid of the drunk jerks that disturb everyone around them….)

Apparently they were filming for a dvd and a PBS special… so if you happen to see that, I was there. 😀

Maybe this is why obesity is a problem in this country….

My new license plate came today:

For select cities, Google has added a street view to its Google Maps. You get a real look at what the streets look like and can even rotate yourself to see things better. Very cool.

Moscone Center West
The Warwick Regency where I stayed for Web 2.0 Expo

Technorati tags: google, google maps

And not at each other’s throats… This is an interesting read:

• NYTimes: A Trip Down Memory Lane and Over the Horizon Rivals for three decades, the two executives have rarely appeared in public together and have generally been viewed as bitter rivals, despite occasional partnerships. In front of about 600 technology executives at the D: All Things Digital conference, which was sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, the two executives attracted the attention usually reserved for rock singers and Hollywood stars.

Congrats to Joi Ito for use of his photo.