Web Teacher

SXSW: Microformats: A Quiet Revolution

Jeremy Keith (blurred), Tantek Celik (standing), Glenn Jones, Karsten Januszewski.

Everyone is using microformats, even if we don’t know it.

Keith showed us huffduffer, a site that creates bookmarks for audio information. It is a consumer of microformats. He talked about rel=”me” for pointing out where you exist on the web. Shows relationship of linked to document to current document. Uses rel=”me” from XFN. If you give your URL to huffduffer, then anything tagged with rel=”me” can be called in from your URL and show as links for you. Then huffduffer goes through all your URLs looking for hCards and avatars and pulls them in. Huffduffer rechecks everything every 24 hours. So if you upload a new avatar to Twitter, huffduffer picks it up within a day. He says we already publish our information, so why make people upload it again for each site. He wants to know how people respond to this. Do they like it, have negative reactions, etc?

Karsten is associated with the MIX09 conference. They built oomph.com that uses microformats to pull in information and get content. Firefox operator plugin shows when there is microformat information on a page. Wrote scripts that will work cross browser (without Firefox plugin) to pull in all micorformats on pages. Available at codeflex.com/oomph.

Glenn works for madgex.com. He talked about how microformats can be used with privacy. Privacy can be implemented by allowing people to use rel=”me” with a system where they sign on and agree to disclose more or less information. Uses oauth, that lets you decide how much access you can get to private information. Microformats are a way to aggregate all the information you leave about yourself on sites like delicious, flickr, upcoming., twitter, linked-in, last.fm, and more. (Shades of the privacy discussion from the previous session.) It pulls in hCard information from all those sites.

Yahoo YQL. Tantek called it an API for the web. Send off a URL and get back all sorts of information.

Tantek. Challenges for microformats are localization and accessibility. Many issues of localization require hacks for language at this point. They are finding solutions to the localization problems. Screen readers have problems with reading out things like dates in a sensible way. They’ve used span elements to solve this. And they’ve begun to store date and time information separately. He wants people to write test cases and implementations and let them know the results. Links on the microformats.org/wiki.

Questions.

SXSW: Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?

Danah Boyd, moderator, with panelists Judith Donath, Alice ?, Siva Vaidhayathan. All three panelists are affiliated with universities.

I’m mainly interested in this panel because I want to see Danah Boyd in action. I’ve been reading her for a long time and am impressed by her writing. I’m torn between watching this panel and the one on The Future of the Internet. Hope someone is blogging The Future of the Internet.

Boyd has been talking to teens about privacy. Vaidhayathan is writing “Is Google the End of Everything?” He talked about how no matter how much we have in a public space (online), there is still a point beyond which privacy is invaded. He talked about that privacy is not a ‘thing’ that has substance and can be traded away in little bits.

Privacy is actually a broad range of concerns about the collection and distribution of information about them.

Alice talked about values. She said social media has value in the technology field. The also talked about the value of social support. Although there is value, there is also a release of information that can be aggregated and used to profile people. If you put information out there, can anyone use it for any reason? She says no.

Donath talked about social visualization. How do all your social media contacts, email, etc., create a visualization of you? People have many public faces in many places. Should you have one large audience in mind or are there different audiences for your public persona? How many personas do you keep?

Boyd: there is a scale of publicity that we’ve never seen before. What are the most important things tech has changed? Vaidhayathan says its about accurate targeting of goods and services. Erosion of comfort level about privacy. In the 70s, privacy laws were passed, but privacy laws undermined by Chaney and others. Interface between personal information and business is not separate from interface between personal information and government.

Donath. We need to be able to “see” what kind of information we are leaving behind when we give information. If we could “see” what we are revealing, it might make us behave in a different way. The data trail is invisible now. In the past, you could reinvent yourself–most of history was not recorded. Now there is continuity that prevents you from leaving your past behind.

Boyd. Most teens don’t consider home a private space. They had more control over their interactions on the internet, so felt it was more private.

Alice. Social context determines the way information flows in that context. Moving information from one context to another is often consider a violation. New tech makes the contexts flow into each other. Personal choices about sharing in between contexts are being erased by technology. Is the burden on the individual or on the business that is collecting information about you? Should the default be that information is not shared?

Vaidhayathan. Information has curreny. We have no way to know how our information is being used. Many people are unaware of the ways to manage information for their own good–checkboxes, switches, online choices, etc. Laws giving even the least sophisticated a level of control are needed.

Donath. Things online can be taken out of context both now and 20 years from now. Everything is moving out of context. Privacy is the sphere of large scale institutional control. Other sphere is around our personal presentation of self.

Boyd. Design is not keeping up with the way we deal with contexts and the merging of info.

Vaidhayathan. Read Jane Jacob about surveillance. Need built in reciprocity in information exchange.

Boyd. Inequalities in information flow. How do you see the issue of celebrity and social interaction? Alice. Not really reciprical even though the celebrity seems to be sharing. A sense of inequality between celebrity and audience. Culture of self-branding and micro celebrity is an issue. Donath. What is the value of the attention that is paid to us? What is the cost of every new person you ‘friend?’ How much do you value the attention that other people pay to you?

Vaidhayathan. Someone who chooses to be engaged with the public deserves to have some say over what kind of information is revealed about them. What about people who haven’t chosen to be engaged with the public? No norms yet making a small avatar on a screen into a real person.

Turned over to questions.

Useful Links: Social Media Products, Typefaces, SXSW photos

Useful links: good resources for using social media, periodic table of typefaces, SXSW photos.

Resources: Web 2.0 Social Media Products, a guide on what to use lists the essentials. Handy.

Periodic Table of Typefaces is brilliant. The teacher in me wants to know where to order poster-size prints for the classroom wall. Hey, Behance, why not team up with Visibone to get this gem published? Visibone already has a direct line straight onto the walls of web design classrooms all over the world.

I’ll be posting photos from SXSW Interactive for the next few days at Flickr. I’m veesees on Flickr.

An RDFa extension for Dreamweaver

Sitepoint got a scoop on announcing Fast Publishing of RDFa with Dreamweaver.

Martin McEvoy has just released the RDFa Documents extension which will (soon) be available via Adobe Exchange once approved. For now you can grab it directly from Martin’s site: v0.1.

I installed the v0.1 extension. The Sitepoint article gives an overview of what it can do. Here’s what I’ve learned about it.

You may recall my my request for an RDFa feature in Dreamweaver. (See Dear Adobe, Here’s an Idea for You.) What I was hoping for was a pulldown list of the DC properties that could be applied to tags. This extension supposedly has a tag library, but I don’t see it.

What you can do is create the DOCTYPE you need in Dreamweaver. In the File > Convert menu, you now have this option.

That creates the following in Dreamweaver:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML+RDFa 1.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/DTD/xhtml-rdfa-1.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

The real question, however, is what kind of code hints do you get for adding Dublin Core meta data to tags. The article at Sitepoint made it sound like there were RDFa code hints for various tags. I don’t see that in the v.01 version that I tried. Here’s an example. What if I want to add property="dc:title" to an <h1> or <h2> element? Here are the code hints for a heading element in Code View with the extension installed:

code hints for an h1 element

The long list of hints for an h1 includes nothing to encourage the use of RDFa meta data.

I don’t think Sitepoint made up the statement that there would be a tag library. But it isn’t found in the code hints. Here’s the information about the extension from the Extension Manager.

the Extension Manager description

You see a reference to the fact that the extension contains an HTML TagLibrary with RDFa attributes. My problem is, where is that TagLibrary? Is it not yet available in v.01? Will be there when the extension is uploaded to the Adobe Exchange?

I’m really excited about this Dreamweaver extension. I think it answers a need. But I’m not seeing an effective way to make use of it at this point.

The hReview microformat I use

My adaptation of the hReview microformat. More . . .

My history with microformats on this blog has been long and mostly happy. I have great success with the hReview format, which is the one I use most frequently. I use it for book reviews, but it can be used for any type of product review.

I thought it might be nice to share the code. Not that I have anything different from what you might see at microformats.org, but I have adapted it a bit.

Here’s the code for the version I use now. It can be adapted to suit; just use the classes that you see for each element so it retains its microformat identity.

<div class="hreview" id="hreview-summary"> <span class="reviewer vcard"> <span class="fn">Reviewer: NAME HERE</span> </span> <span class="type" style="display:none">product</span> <img alt="photo of 'PRODUCT NAME'" src="PRODUCT PHOTO URL" class="photo" /> <div class="item"> <a class="fn url" href="PRODUCT URL">PRODUCT NAME</a> </div> <div class="description"> <p><abbr title="5" class="rating">★★★★★ </abbr></p> <p> WRITE REVIEW HERE </p> <p class="summary">Summary: SUMMARY</p> </div> </div>

I hand code in the number of stars I want to give using the character entity ★ because I haven’t had good luck with the autogenerated stars. Nor do they look good in Safari unless I use the character entity.

Google is very quick to pick up hReview information, which is why I’m so fond of it.

Useful Links: Twitter hashtags, Imagine Cup, microformats, a CSS presentation

Twitter hashtags, a competition for students, microformats and a CSS presentation. More . . .

What’s that Hashtag? New glossary of tools for Twitter at Contentious is a good list of links to helpful Twitter tools, including the new site Tagref where you can register a hashtag.

Students will be interested in the Microsoft Imagine Cup Competition, a global Technology Student Competition focused on solving real world issues.. To learn more, start at Web Designer Wall.

Emily Lewis, from A Blog Not Limited, announced a deal with Peachpit to write a microformats book. I know she’s going to do a top notch job, and look forward to being one of her first readers. Emily honored me with a little shout out in the announcement on her blog. I’ve mentioned her work before in a number of places: here, here, here, and here, as well as there, and there.

Speaking of Emily Lewis, she and co-leader Jason Nakai of the Webuquerque section of the Albuquerque Adobe Users Group gave a program about CSS last night. Here are a few tweets and a photo from the event. One of the tweets includes a link to the presentation.

2009-03-05T04:09:28Z