sylleptic - mark hopwood’s blog

I have a piece of software called Operator installed on my computer, which adds some nice functionality to my Firefox web browser. It looks for things called microformats. Microformats are structured pieces of information in web pages that can describe all sorts of things like people’s names and addresses and calendar events, in a standard way so they can be read by software and not just the human reading the page. Once read, the standard information can be sent to other bits of software, like your calendar or your address book.

This has been a minority interest for some time, pursued by geeks and not really making any impact on the mass market, so I was very interested to see that the Radio Times TV Guide is now including microformats in its TV listings, meaning that I can add my favourite programmes to my calendar very, very easily. It’s been suggested that the next version of the Firefox web browser could have support for microformats built in. As more people adopt Google calendar and other online personal information managers, web developers need to include microformats wherever they can, to get the information out of the web page and into people’s calendars and address books.

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This one not so good, from Youtube.

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My friend, Mike Carter, is in the Daily Telegraph today, talking about some of the data that the Zoomf property search platform has produced.

I have a small involvement in Zoomf, and I’ve worked with most of the executive team over a number of years in different ways. It’s really exciting to see it starting to take off.

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Apologies to Paolo at http://gnuband.org/ and thanks for letting me know. Recaptcha, the software that stops spammers attacking this blog, had stopped working. I’ve sorted it out now, and a Freebase invitation is on its way to your inbox.

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They can certainly drink in Liverpool

Originally uploaded by harkmopwood

1 bottle of Larger please!
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Research by my colleagues at Agency.com has highlighted the existence of a small group of hard-core digital uploaders, about 8% of the online population, who do most of the creating of user generated content, enjoyed by so many.

The research was unveiled at Cannes the week before last by James Clifton, our European Group Strategy Director. You can download and discuss the highlights here.

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http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html contains a very helpful and balanced appraisal of the Facebook API, now that it’s been around for a few weeks. The key points for me were:

• The amount of thought and effort that has gone into the API’s design at Facebook, and the opportunities it creates as a result
• The API gives very good access to Facebook data, from web services, a query language and a mark-up language that you use instead of HTML
• There are limitations on what you can do from a visual perspective, when you’re building with the API’s data, but you can create iframes that do their own thing
• Distribution is taken care of by Facebook’s application directory and a well-proven viral mechanism where Facebook members share good stuff with each other in a highly promiscuous way
• There’s a high risk to a company’s infrastructure if it deploys something that does go viral: some people are having to deploy hundreds of additional servers to cope with the traffic it is generating, at a high cost

I’d recommend anyone who is interested in social networking to read the whole article. It’s also very well written, which is in itself an excellent reason to read it.

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This story at the BBC surprised me. Apparently some people are paying others to be them online, updating their social networking content at Facebook, LinkedIn and on their blogs, when they’re too busy to do it themselves. The money is pretty good, if you can find a busy professional with disposable cash who needs to maintain a healthy presence online.

It’s a bit like paying someone to stay in touch with your friends and family on your behalf, which I guess might be quite appealing to some people.

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