Are you a screen reader user, or know someone who is? Want to contribute to making the Beeb a more accessible place?

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!

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

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.