Thursday, June 30, 2005

OpenEvents and Microformats

Seems like all my blogging-love has been going to the JotSpot Developer Blog lately...  *Sigh*.  Don't get me wrong, I love writing there because I can combine my passion for collaboration software with my admiration for Jot's amazing capabilities and a growing Jot developer community.   

But there's something about writing here on ehick that I've missed -- a place to write out loud more wholistically and randomly about stuff.  Niall Kennedy of Technorati and I were talking about this last week at Gnomedex -- even when your personal and professional interests overlap hugely, there's satisfaction in making and maintaining a distinction.  So I think I'm back!



Speaking of Gnomedex, after a week's rumination on my initial thoughts and listening to the conversation about "How do you design a remixable Web application?", my long-term takeaway is a renewed interest and sense of importance of Microformats (explained). 



Funny because there wasn't an explicit talk about them, but the moment the Microsoft dudes started demoing Outlook subscribed to a custom RSS "calendar feed" using iCal files in enclosures, I thought of Microformats and hCalendar.  Others did too.  Kevin Marks wrote to this effect soon thereafter, as have many folks since.  Adding additional semantic mark up to XHTML makes too much sense for these types of use cases.



Ever since my Google/Internet Arcive meet Mr. Event post last year I remain personally fascinated with "OpenEvents" and the event space in general, even thought I've lagged in keeping up with what's being said and doneEVDB is supporting hCalendar and just launched their new API. Upcoming.org seems to be cranking and has an APITrumba's all shiny and new, but not sure they're going the Microformat way...?



All cool stuff, happening quickly.  At the very least I'm going to consume more of this myself to get the user's perspective.



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