It is that time of year again: SXSWi panel pimpage! I’ve put together a somewhat vague panel proposal on behalf of microformats.org and I would appreciate it if you could give it a vote.

Apparently voting only counts towards a relatively small percentage (30%) of whether or not it will be selected, but with 2346 proposals in the system, I suspect it counts a lot more than that.

The session is rather vaguely defined because I’m not really sure right now what’ll still be interesting in a few months. I also want to garner as many opinions from the community as they can about what they want to know more about, see speak or show off – so do make your voice heard in the comments.

SXSW submissions are a bit nuts, really.

The mega-conference happens in March every year. By the time you’re done clearing your credit card bill and the fuss on twitter has died down a few weeks after the event, it’s already time to submit proposals for the coming year with the deadline at the start of July.

That means you need to think about your proposal a good 9 or 10 months before the next event.

In my mind, it’s incredibly difficult to predict what will be a hot topic or really relevant 10 months down the line in an industry like ours. Things move incredibly quickly. I also find it very difficult to know what to vote for – I may find at the beginning of next year that actually, I really could have done with knowing more about The Latest Technique, but right now I don’t know what it is to vote for it.

I also worry that interesting topics that I don’t know about yet don’t have the community around it to rally support and get the votes. Inevitably, the topics that are most trendy or have the most well-known organisers/panelists will be the topics that get the most votes. They tend not to be the panels I’ve enjoyed the most, though. Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly hard to figure out which sessions are going to be great and which aren’t, since SXSW is just so big now – I think it has become quantity over quality. </ complain>

Anyway, not a lot I can do about that other than play along and attempt to include a session that I will attempt to put together at a level that I deem acceptable quality. I do want to see microformats.org have a representation there, so help me out, huh?

p.s. The spelling of the tag “microformats” as “micoformats” is not mine. It’s theirs. And I asked to have it corrected, but apparently their system doesn’t easily allow for that at the moment. WTF?

Sorry for the delay, but I finally got around to sticking my presentation from last month’s London Web Standards meet-up on slideshare. Slideshare is a bit naff to be honest, but it’ll do for now. If you click through to the talk on slideshare, you’ll be able to get my notes which should hopefully make the pictures more useful. Jake‘s busy syncing up both of our presentations to the videos so that we can show them on the BBC developer blog, so as soon as they’re available I’ll link those up too and you can view me in full hand-flapping, ranting form.

I think I speak for both of us when I say that we really enjoyed the evening – everyone was lovely and friendly and asked really excellent questions. Highly recommendable meet-up, and we’re both intending to try and make it to some of the future sessions.

Some useful links from my stuff:

• My previous write-up about using Woosh (although note that Woosh has become a bit more featureful since that write-up)
• QUnit
• Glow Github repos and the Glow website and docs
• JSDoc Toolkit

Jake and I will be guests at March’s London Web Standards meetup. We’re giving a pair of JavaScript themed talks that should give plenty of fodder for the latter half of the evening’s discussion. I’m doing “Pro bun-fighting“, covering how we manage working on a large scale JavaScript project with a small team, our process, the performance and quality testing we do, and how to integrate group hugs, and Jake will be doing “The events left behind“, talking about the horrors of keyboard events, how to work around them and what’s their future.

Although it’s not a Glow specific talk, we will be using Glow in our examples, so feel free to come along and talk to us about the library too, if you’re interested.

Tickets are available now for the event on Wednesday 31st March at The Square Pig in London.

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.

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 kept saying to myself that I will eventually get around to writing something about this, but being out of the office for 8 days and the best part of offline for 10 means I’ve just had too much getting in my way.

In short: South by South West was great!

First things first; our panel.

Well, it went well. I think. People have been nice and positive about it. Two main concerns generally were a) that it wasn’t exactly what we were billed to do and b) some people didn’t know what microformats were. Well, regarding point b – it wasn’t billed as an introduction to. We only had so much time, and we felt that those likely to want to attend this particular session would already have a foundation, or at least an interest enough to have read about them a little, in microformats enough to know what was going on. I’m sorry if you didn’t get it – I’m more than happy to give you an intro to if you drop me an email (fberriman AT gmail).

As for the first point. You’re right. We did do more of a history/what’s cool now, as opposed to looking deeply into the future. To be honest, it’s hard to know what’ll happen exactly. I think we did a good job in showing that take up has been brilliant and a lot of big names are getting involved with supporting and implementing microformats, and that there’s real ways you can start using microformats in your day-to-day internet experience.

How did I cope, I hear you ask? I was nervous as anything (particular thanks to Patrick who put up with me being the best part of mute that morning).

About 10 minutes before going on, we learnt that rather than being in a small room which I had somewhat managed to psych myself up for – we’d be in the biggest room (18ABCD). This means I was not at all prepared for the green lighting and the spotlights and the 700-odd people!

Tantek, Glenn and Mike were brilliant though. I’ve heard back from a few people who were genuinely really impressed with the backnetwork and Operator. Jeremy Keith joined us about half way in after a completely unplanned, but perfect, question which allowed him to show of his cool little bluetooth trick.

I did learn that I don’t like prepared speeches though. About 2 lines in, I realised I’d for some reason abandoned what I had planned to say and was making it up on the spot. I did not enjoy that. I did however really like the Q&A section. Having to think on the spot about what people wanted to know about seemed to have the effect of removing a bit of my stage fright. I suppose I prefer conversational tones.

Am I glad I did it overall? Yep. Would I do it again? No. Actually, yeah, I might… if I could do some more smaller things in the mean time and get some practice in, I’d consider it.

Other than that, SxSW was fun. It was a good chance to put some faces to names I knew online and meet a few new ones. Panel wise, I made a bit of an effort to avoid subjects in my field since I didn’t expect to learn that much and headed for more unusual topics. I went to quite a few of the game track (screenburn) sessions, and really enjoyed them. It was especially interesting to learn that they are having a lot of similar issues surrounding maintaining identities/networks in different parts of the web as we are. Also quite fun to know that OpenID is a topic for them.

I have more to write I think, but this is already a long post and late! “Hi” if I met you though, it was a pleasure.

The Growth and Evolution of Microformats panel at SXSWi has been added to the rather handy panel planner on the SXSWi site (shame it’s not marked up as hCalendar though – [edit] the panel picker has now been microformated!). It gives a little bit more of an overview about what it’ll be about:

In its first year, microformats.org ushered in the rapid adoption of key formats for publishing and sharing tags, licenses, contacts, relationships, events and reviews on the Web. See what new microformats are being developed for resumes, classified listings, music, and media, as well as how tens of millions of established microformats on web sites of individuals, companies, and organizations are driving innovations in desktop applications and advancing personal data portability

You’ll also note that the rest of the panel is announced too. We’ve got Tantek of course – *the* microformat advocate, and moderating the session. Michael Kaply from IBM is the man behind the Operator toolbar for Firefox, which in my mind is the most complete and fully functional addition for Firefox for detection and use of microformats. Glenn Jones is the only one of the bunch I’ve had the pleasure to have met before – he was 1 third of our microformats triple bill at the first BarCampLondon (along with Drew Mclellan and myself). He’s an implementor and created the backnetwork which is stuffed to the gills with microformats. He also presents on the topic, and did so recently with Destroying Walled Gardens at BarCampLondon2.

Then there’s me, of course. Makes me consider my place in the group though.

I mentioned this to a few people and they simply said that I was the human side of things. Possibly more down to earth and using microformats in day to day development. Not too many ideas of grandure and using them practically, and advocating and explaining them in simple terms to those who want to learn about them.

I’m also the most community involved panelist. That might not seem important, but when you realise that microformats wouldn’t exist without the community it’s a lot more. Every spec and decision made about microformats is done by an organic community of people, like myself, who are enthusiasts. It’s this organic growth thats let microformats spring up out of nowhere and gather speed and support so quickly.

I think it’s a good mix though, and I’m looking forward to the panel even if I am a touch nervous.

On Saturday I got to go on a trip to Oxford. I’ve only been there once before, and that was at night for a work function so I didn’t really get to see it. It’s a pretty place. Steve and I went along to a little lunch at “The Big Bang” that John Oxton organised with various geeks. The food was great. The Big Bang is a place that just does sausage and mash – I, of course, went for one of the veggie options (mushroom and garlic, I believe) and it was yum. We stuck around for drinks down “The Friar’s Entry” (yes, I know) and yeah… generally chatted about all things geek and custard.

Last night was 20×2. I genuinely remember little about my slot, bar the panic. The problem was I had a keynote presentation, and I thought I’d be able to run it from my laptop – but I had to have the slides on a different one, and my notes from my version on Steve’s mac – so I was trying to operate the laptop, the remote and hold a mic and speak…blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Too much tech., not enough nerve. Plus, the lights were bright onto the stage, so I couldn’t really make eye contact with anyone – which tends to help me, and I couldn’t see the warning lights – so I probably over-ran badly. Argh! Why do I do these things to myself?

Oh well.

Other than that, I had a really good night. I got to meet a few more faces, and everyone else’s slots were really, really cool. A proper variety – artists, musicians, comedians, bloggers… all kinds, and all surprisingly different in their take on the question.

20×2 is an ongoing project that exists to showcase the creativity that lurks in each of us. Writers, musicians, filmmakers, web geeks and other bon vivants are asked to take two minutes each to answer the question of the day. The results can be as varied as the emotions and reactions they evoke.

20×2 is coming to London next month, and I’ve been invited to do a spot! It’s probably a moment of insanity on my part to agree to do it, but it is only 2 minutes, and I did say I wanted to do more “things”.

Basically, 20 people are each given the same question and fill a 2 minute slot based upon this question, and you can do or say whatever you like!

This session’s question is “Where Am I?”. I don’t have the foggiest idea what to do yet – so I’m taking suggestions. What do you think?

20×2 is going to be in London on the 19th November at Madame JoJo’s in Soho.