fberriman

I mentioned at the start of the year that we were planning to have another “Microformat vEvent” in the first quarter… well, slightly later than planned I’m pleased to announce that we’re good to go and you can now sign up!

The event has been delayed so that we could take part in a new grander event which is London Web Week. It’s going to be a solid week of all things webby, and includes other such highlights as @media London, BarCampLondon 4, a Web Standards Group event and a new one-day conference aimed at new comers who are just interested in or starting out in web development and design, called Web Roots. Even Pub Standards is sneaking in on the act (keep an eye on upcoming for the “The Great Pub Standards Heresy“).

The full schedule of events is available here and I expect it’ll expand to contain a few of the London user groups for various web… things… over the next few weeks.

So, back to the point of my post. Microformats vEvent!

The good news is, I’ve managed to twist the arms of a couple of nice folks to do some speaking for us. We’ve got Dan Brickley and Tom Morris. Surprisingly, both usually more aligned with the RDF camp rather than microformats - but I’m personally up for breaking down that wall (and I hope they are too) and seeing if we can’t all “get along”. So, with that in mind, they will each be taking on topics that look at microformats working along side other semantic web technologies in complementary ways.

Full details on what these guys will be talking about are again, on the sign-up page, as well where and when (The Yorkshire Grey Pub, Holborn, Tuesday 27th May, 7pm) you need to show up. Make sure you sign-up quickly though - we’ve only got a limited amount of space, and entrance is with ticket only.

I went to one day* of SemanticCamp this weekend at Imperial College in London. It was really enjoyable and it was great to see so many people show up and take part. Kudos to Tom Morris and Daniel John Lewis for their organisational skills.

Ben Ward and I represented microformats.org and did a presentation-ish chat and Q&A session entitled “Microformats: State of the Nation” and covered recent happenings in the microformat world and some things we might hope to see this year.

So, when I say “presentation-ish” what we did was chat about a list of things that we’d thought about during the morning, presented via a quick list from my email inbox, via my new Asus EEE (which is still super cute, and is the black 4GB surf before you ask). Yeah, we’re professional. To sum up what we covered though, here’s an elaborated version of said list:

• Current:
  • Big Deployments
  • Kelkoo listings (hListing, soon), hCards
  • Google Social Graph (XFN and FOAF indexing)
• Parsers increasing:
  • PHP (hKit)
  • XSL: Optimus, x2v
  • .NET (ufXtract)
  • Python (AUMP (currently offline))
  • Java? Oh. Soz.
• New Formats:
  • Audio (Last.FM, Songbird, Music browsers)
  • Listings
  • Recipe?
• Accessibility:
  • Building better relationships with accessibility community
  • Clarified the uses of the include-pattern, via Mike Davies of Yahoo
  • More to come… - Hopefully full abbr-pattern testing
• Future:
  • Distributed Social Networking
  • Google Social Graph API
  • Distributed identity with OpenID
  • Distributed contact lists
  • Build on URLs
  • Consolidate identity URLs using XFN
  • hCard providing context and detail
  • XFN describing social relationships

We had lots of questions and it was actually great. One thing that came up a couple of times in a few conversations I had was a desperate need for a full test suite for microformats. Unfortunately, such things are hard to get done because the work is time consuming and not especially interesting or rewarding. I wonder if anyone has experience on the best way to get a full test set written for all current formats?

Our session overran, but thanks for coming by if you did and as always, feel free to come by and join the mailing list(s) and get involved.

* Day two I did not make it to due to late night Brighton fun for Andy Budd’s flat-warming. Thanks very much for putting us up for the night, Jeremy! Apologies to SemanticCampers who wanted to play with the EEE some more.

25 today.

I have a version 3 Gupi to live with my Nabaztag/tag (all courtesy of the lovely PTG). My home will become the tamest Jurassic Park of electronic, vaguely intelligent, pets.

I also have the exciting news that I am now an Editor for Digital Web Magazine. I have yet to do anything in my official capacity, but I’m looking forward to getting started.

It was the end of 2006 when Drew Mclellan and I threw the last microformat event in London and now it’s almost 2008 and we haven’t had another. Cryin’ shame, I say.

So, we’re going to hold another event. We’re ironing out the details, but the bones of it will be a mostly social event in London in the early part of 2008, with a couple of interesting people talking about the latest microformat and semantic web related things and some beer thrown in for good measure.

To help us out though, we’d really appreciated it if you could register your interest in such an event on the microformats.org wiki. The page you need to visit is here: http://microformats.org/wiki/events/2008-london-microformats-vevent We’ll also be filling up that page with the details as they happen, so do keep an eye on it.

Note: If you don’t fancy signing up to the wiki, don’t worry about it. Drop a comment here and I’ll add you.

I haven’t even started looking through this properly yet, but Patrick just brought to my attention the results of the A List Apart Web Design Survey 2007 and it’s a great read so far.

Being the unwilling complainer and non-supporter of discrimination (either the negative or the positive types), I’m always especially interested in those bits of data referring to us ladies, and these are some items that have caught my eye so far:

• Women perceive a high level of gender bias in the industry than men do (but only 22.3%).
• The number of people (male & female) who think there is definitely not a gender bias in total is a huge 63.8% (only 1.7% think there definitely is one). It’s important to note the tone of this was to “ask specifically if the respondent feels that his or her career has been impacted by bias, not whether the respondent perceives there to be discrimination in the field”.
• Women have around the same or higher salaries than men in the industry (highest in the $20,000 - $79,999 salary range).
• “In general, female respondents who work full time do not seem to make less than male respondents who also work full time, and in fact may earn a bit more. This pattern can be seen in Fig. 3.5., “Salary range by gender,” in Section Three.”.
• “A greater percentage of women than men believe they lack a needed back-end development skill (Fig. 10.3).” (28.8%).

Of course, as with all polls - is this data representative? What percentage of people working in the web industry read things like ALA? It’s a shame census aren’t more detailed like this.

I’m not sure exactly what to say yet, but it certainly supports some thoughts I have on the matter of women in web development. I think there’s always been a lot of talk about discrimination specifically within our industry (dare I even mention the matter of female speakers at conferences, or the lack thereof?) but with very little data and evidence to back up various arguments. I’d like to see some well formed discussions come from research like this and I hope to do just that as soon as I’ve digested the information and done a little more background work.

So I bit the bullet about 2 weeks ago and signed up to Facebook. Why? Well, I have complained about how much I dislike the entire thing for at least the last 6 months (if not longer) but it was rightfully pointed out to me that I cannot complain about something of which I have had no experience of. Well, I’ve got 2 weeks of experience now and this is what I think.

I spent the first 48 hours or so quite addicted to it, adding everyone I ever knew ever as a friend and having fun setting the details on how I met each person. I’ve just gone over 100 friends and my ego is satisfied. Great. It’s kind of cool to say “Hi” to someone I’ve not hung out with for 7 years, but after the “Hi” that’s about it. It’s a bit awkward. Is this because I’m a bad person with no social skills, or did we just stop hanging out for a reason?

Then, I had fun adding a few of the applications. Connecting myself up to a few of the sites I actually DO use on the ‘net (flickr, upcoming, dopplr, etc.) so that in theory I could show those that cared (who does?) what I do on other sites or more likely, I could pretend/brag to myself and others that I have a life outside of Facebook. It’s a bit of a one way street. Just dragging in stuff from other sites to display in another place. I can’t push much back out to those sites though. This must be the walled garden I was hearing about.

As I was locating and finding applications, I discovered that other people had slightly less useful, but more personally interactive apps., and I love a good excuse to fill out a survey to see which Pokémon I’m most like or which film star I’m most likely to marry. General time wasting. I can compare my film tastes with my friend? Sounds like potential fun and conversation. OK… oh wait, I’ve got to add this piece of crap to MY profile as well just to do this? Erm… no. It appears that to interact with anything you’ve got to also say you want to use it too. It’s viral in a bad, forced way. Oh, and if that wasn’t bad enough, my inbox is now filled with requests to try out just about every application my awful friends have decided is fun today (I’m turning off all notifications I can as I pause from typing).

The search. The most irritating search I’ve ever used. Just to say certain names are pretty common. I can only search with more attributes if the person I’m searching for is in a network that I belong to. That seems a bit ridiculous. I have friends that aren’t in any specific network, or I associate with a group of people too small to require their own network. Yeah, I can try and find people from my IM listings (that’s useful) but if a friend is unfortunate enough to have a common name, and not be listed with their IM details, it’s virtually impossible to locate them unless you find them on a shared friend’s list or you ask them (but if you’re using Facebook to get back into contact with old friends, it’s possibly safe to assume you currently can’t contact them).

So, I really am failing to find an actual use other than for time wasting and ego-boosting. I’m quite nosey, so I suppose I do enjoy seeing who’s just fallen out with who or just started seeing someone else etc., and I do like friending people I haven’t spoken to for ages just because I want to see where they’re working or if they’re still with so’n’so. It’s passive gossip and I like that. It’s the same reason I like Twitter, but at least it’s not as nerdy.

I also am reasonably keen on having all of my contacts in one place. Granted, most of the people I really want to talk to I already have in my phone book or on my IM or (heaven forbid) I see them regularly, but it is valuable to have a centralised list of people from various networks. I haven’t figured out WHY yet, but I can see a time when I might want to organise something or announce that I’m emigrating to Mars and it would be a lot less hassle for me if I can just mass-spam this information to everyone I’ve ever met.

At the end of the day though, I’m bored of signing up for networks. This is a fad. I think I said MySpace was a fad too and refused to sign up to that, and that’s fallen away to be replaced by Facebook (and dare I say it, but at least MySpace was helping to expose some musical talents, if nothing else). Something else’ll be along and I’ll be complaining about that this time next year too. Someone please tell me why “this is the one”?

Can’t I just have one home and this can be it?

I have apparently forgotten that I wanted to have a site to blog because I have stuff I wanted to say. I haven’t blogged for over a month because I’ve had no where to do so because I was waiting and hoping that Luke would get things up and running again soon. It’s just too long and I shouldn’t rely on freebies. So, while I sort out proper hosting with customer services who’ll rightly hear my wrath if things break because I’m paying for the pleasure, I’ve set up home here. Priority one is to blog.

I am taking recommendations for hosting though, if anyone has one.

Dear Readers,

I apologise for the downtime. This was due to an effort to create a more reliable experience for you. Packets were lost and words were exchanged between the server that shall not be repeated, but replacements have now been found and something like a normal service will now resume. Thank you for your patience.

Yours truely,

Frances

In other news, I have finished one job to start another in my absense. The brief version is as follows;

Having spent almost a year and a half at Volume and learning as much as I could and generally having a pretty good experience, I thought it was about time to move on. Kind of an odd time to do so in hindsight, because as I was leaving they were just picking up into a new phase and have a shedload of work (this is a good thing) and new clients. I’m sure they’ll do well.

Fortunately, the opportunity to do something new came my way and I can now be found loitering at the BBC as a client-side developer. I’ve been at the BBC a week so far, and am pleased! I can’t imagine I’ll blog anymore about that than I did the last job mind you, so this is just an “FYI”.

I was sad to leave DJ Pauly C who was the most active in making my stay at Volume enjoyable, but I’m sure he’ll forgive me in time.

Last week I attended my first ever @media. After offering to pretty much sell a kidney to go last year, I was extra chuffed to get to go and help out too! Plus, it was a double treat for me in that I got to see the results of Patrick’s hard work over the last few months (which I’ve somewhat had the pleasure of seeing from behind the scenes) as well as of course having the opportunity to see a host top presenters.

Highlight for me? Joe Clark, easily. I like his take-no-prisoners attitude and that he speaks his mind. I gather a few people may not agree with him, but that’s cool - I think what he does especially well is just give you another point-of-view to look a problem from and encourages you to really evaluate what the real issue is.

I also enjoyed Drew and Colly’s High Noon Shoot-out. Not only was it funny, but it did have an underlying point that compromise and knowing your audience is really important.

I’m really want the podcasts to be available now, because I never remember to take any notes.

Ah, but the best bit is that the @media fun does not end there. @media Ajax has been announced for later this year in November!

Best swag of the event? My personalised green @media logo shirt, of course.

I’m always looking for new and innovative ways to completely waste my time online, so when I met Justin Hall at SxSW this year and heard about some of the cool things he was doing with games and user-surfing patterns, I knew his PMOG would probably be for me as someone who has been addicted to various MMORPGs and is a bit of a statistics collector.

He and his team’s specific PMOG can be found over at Bud.com, and you can find me as Phae.

The general premise is that it’s a world and game that you’re interacting with and in all of the time that you’re surfing about on the web. In it’s simplest terms, this is currently done by installing a plug-in onto Firefox and letting it collect the URLs you visit. The type of interaction you do with the web and the type of sites you visit determine your alignment and class.

That might seem a bit invasive to some, but that’s another kettle of fish - this is just for fun uses, not subterfuge and you can flick the plug-in off if you’d rather spend a bit of time without it logging you.

Now, surfing the web rewards you with XP - much like the traditional RPG - journeying means you’re experiencing. The only difference is you don’t actively have to do much - there’s no beasties to battle along the way (yet?) or keys to find or any other such fantasy. You’re just rewarded for being an active internet user.

That’s the passive part.

The really interesting bit about this to me is the not-so-passive layer they’re adding. You can start to interact and do more of the game part. This is done via the traditional Quest formula. Quests in a PMOG universe mean visiting a group of pre-determined links on a theme and getting some extra XP for doing so. Along the way you might find some fun new sites or, heaven forbid, learn something new. The Quests are created by other users, so there’s a variety of themes.

Then there’s other things like Portals - which allow a player to send another player to a new URL (like a hint, or trick, to get them to visit something new) by attaching a portal to a specific site. Another fun item is Mines - which can be planted on a URL, so that when a player visits the URL they step on the mine and forfeit some of their Datapoints (the currency of PMOG, gained passively over time). Other special items are in the works.

Now, the really fun part for me and the bit that’s really piqued my interest is the Items. Items in this universe will be embedded into websites via HTML using standardised class names and values.

What’s that?

Yep - microformatting to give richer mark-up and machine readable, extractable, data which in this case will be magic items that can be collected (and probably in the future sold, swapped, used or combined).

OK, I admit, it’s a bit of microformat’s principle no-no in that most likely these items will be hidden away and forgotten about in various websites that want to be richer parts of the PMOG universe, and also not human readable in the first instance, but what a fun use of microformats!

One thing that is missing from the PMOG universe at the moment is NPCs - but they could be set up just as easily as items using hCard, and then they can guide players off to new Quests and Items. Or something like that, anyway. Lots of potential.

I’m quite keen on following what they’re going to do with this on the grander scale. Sometimes it’s nice to feel like you’re part of a big game and have everything you’re doing have another level of use (all be it just a fun, and intensely nerdy, one) and with real-life and internet social network lines blurring more every day, why not start blurring that one between gaming aswell?