beTech :: Evolve Already

It’s not too late to check out the New Horizons in Teaching & Research Conference taking place on Central Grounds right now. Though focused on teaching and research, this event has plenty to offer to Web-heads like yourself—the only problem may be in deciding which event to skip in order to see another.

RSS and ATOM are everywhere, but reading about the history and politics of news feeds (and meditating on their limitations) got me thinking: why aren’t there more popular microformats out there and how come headlines are the only thing taking the web by storm?

In part, the answer is that news feeds aren’t the only microformat taking the web by storm. If you think about it, there is (as Yoda said) another. Podcasts. Yep, podcasts are really a microformat. They are just a proprietary one owned and popularized by Apple. Tell the truth, that kind of annoys me. And if webheads like ourselves don’t jump on the opportunity, a lot more companies are going to do what Apple did and get out of the gates on a whole variety of microformats. If they succeed at making those microformats popular, as Apple has, they will also determine how open those microformats are, and that’s bad for everyone.

Two companies in particular, called PubSub and Broadband Mechanics, have realized the potential in rolling microformats that will empower bloggers to post new content types, such as reviews, events, and classifieds. They’ve dubbed their initiative “structured blogging“.

So I ask you webheads: are you using all the microformats you could be in your work? And what new microformats can you envision? Just staying in the realm of news and media, there could be microformats for common multimedia, such as bitmap slideshows with captions and/or soundtracks (a common format with the New York Times), or a linked video series such as often appears on YouTube.

And while we’re thinking up microformats, let’s ask ourselves: How can average folks start and popularize new microformats? What makes for a well-conceived, well-constructed one? And how can we all avoid Dave Winer’s mistakes?

Scholars have a new folksonomy service that operates much like del.icio.us—the wildly popular Web-based tagging application. Created by Nature Publishing Group?s New Technology team, Connotea is free, open source, and quite promising. Like del.icio.us, Connotea allows you to save links to your articles online, apply your own keyword “tags” to these links, discover new content based on other’s tags, and get search upates via RSS. Connotea adds a scientific punch with OpenURL link alternatives and Digital Object Identifier (DOI) functionality.