Indie-electronica with a dash of 80s synth. Pretty upbeat and good fun and reminiscent of Postal Service, making them an obvious support act. I also dig that they’re Belgian.

Death Cab for Cutie

Difficult to be objective about a band you’re sentimentally attached to, but they were a good show. To play to the big crowd, they stuck to the favourites and played them as-is from the recordings. I prefer live shows to give something a little unique and varied from their releases, but it’s a minor complaint. I just won’t need to see them in the flesh again.

Death Cab for Cutie at Brixton Academy, 17th July 2008

Post-rock by numbers. Accomplished, but boring

Phosphorescent

Beautiful voice and keys. Shame about the bassist and his attention seeking ways. A good find, regardless.

Pinback

Keeping it old skool with plenty of non photo-blue vibes. Pity 95% of the audience had never heard it and it’s chums though.

Pinback at Scala, 15th July 2008

My friend and colleague Jake Archibald published a summary of what’s happened so far, what the current alternative suggestions are and the BBC’s take on them. It’s a useful read if you want to catch-up and see where we are.

I think the best thing to come out of this is probably that we’re talking about actual alternatives again rather than just waiting for more evidence (which often feels like a get-out clause for inaction). Whether we’re doing that right though… well, we’ll see. I appreciate the apprehension that comes with changing something that’s already had some seal of “yep.. good to go.. use it!” - no one wants to get this “wrong” again. Equally though, I really do hope we can come to a compromise and “solve” the problem this time. Extending HTML 4 was ever going to be especially pretty, but bear with us (please don’t mention HTML 5 to me - it’s for your own good).

On lighter notes, here’s a couple interesting microformatty things:

• Portable Social Networks, The Building Blocks Of A Social Web by Ben Ward
• The Clangers Guide to Microformats by Drew McLellen

And lastly, I wanted to mention that I should hopefully have details on the next London Microformats vEvent very soon.

Based on feedback from the last event we held during London Web Week, Drew and I are planning a “Getting Started” event, with back-to-basics semantics and microformats implementations.

Okay, first things first - I realise there’s a wider discussion about women in any industry, and specifically in stereotypically male orientated ones, such as science, engineering and technology. I happen to work within a specific sector of all these - web development - and therefore I realise I’m only qualified to really comment on this one area, and that’s fine. I only want to comment on that one, this time.

The Guardian published “Geek Goddesses” today suggesting that there aren’t more women in the field because of a lack of female role-models:

Young women show huge interest and aptitude in these fields, out-performing the boys in chemistry, maths, biology, physics and technology at A-level. But while 90% of 11-16-year-old girls think technology is cool, 73% would not choose it as a career because of its lack of female role models.

Is this suggesting that 73% of women need a role model in order to pursue a career? What the hell? I’m sorry - I thought that people chose careers based on aptitude and interest rather than a lack of people to follow or look up to. And let’s just pretend for a minute that that factoid is correct - do people need to have role models of the same gender (which this article also suggests)?

I find that some articles paint web development as an inherently sexist industry. I must have missed a memo detailing how and when this occurs, because that’s such complete and utter nonsense as far as I’m concerned. I find it hard to think of an industry that in my experience has been nothing but completely open, inviting, easy to join and easy to work within.

I have spent the best part of the last 3 years attending, or being involved with organising, all kinds of geek events - Geek Dinners (not the “Girl” variety), Pub Standards, @media, d.construct, SxSW, WSG… the list goes on - not once have I ever seen a women being ignored or belittled because the men in the room think she’s “not in the know”. I don’t know what events Sarah Blow is hanging out at, but, quite frankly, they’re not the right ones if she’s being treated as she claims to have been in the article.

Articles like this can only do damage to our industry by describing it incorrectly in a bad light - why on earth would anyone want to be involved in an industry that is made out to be bigoted, let alone the women this is aimed at?

If you think you’re being subjugated, creating a little club just for you not only drives home the idea that yes, you do indeed need to be treated with kid gloves, it lets any discriminatory behaviour off the hook by walking away from it.

The BBC is looking for people to let them know what screen reader users hear when they visit the new Programmes pages, which just happen to contain the ever controversial abbreviation design pattern contained within the hCalendar microformat, or whether they expand and listen to title attributes and abbreviations at all.

Please pop on over to the BBC RadioLabs blog article and leave your feedback or get in touch if you would think you can help test!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.