Archive for the 'Microformats' Category

MyBlogLog Features hCards

MyBlogLog continues to impress advocates of open standards. After rolling out microformats like <rel="tag"> and XFN, MicroID, and FOAF it announced the addition of hCards and vCards to the profiles of its users last night.

vCards and hCards

Profiles feature two new icons now: one for vCards and one for hCards:

mybloglog profile

Clicking the vCard icon (that’s the left one), the vCard can be downloaded to a computer and added to a user’s favourite address book. Clicking the hCard icon, a separate page is displaying profile information:

mybloglog hcard

Privacy Settings

People having a MyBlogLog account know that they can add rather private information like their telephone number to their profiles. Though they can decide if this information is publicly viewable, only by their contacts or by nobody. MyBlogLog has added those privacy settings to the hCard and vCard information as well. So if users decide their telephone number is only available to their contacts, other people can’t access that information by hCard or vCard. The same applies for services which parse hCards.

That’s actually pretty cool because this is the first service I am aware of that offers granular privacy settings for hCards. I am sure that this implementation also helps reducing fears that contact information will be widely available on the web without users’ consent.

Well done! :)

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Related?

You decide.

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Even Dischord has Microformats

Ha, just ordered some CDs directly from Dischord Records - couldn’t resist with Dollar/Euro exchange rates we have these days - and realized that they have the hCard and adr microformats on their site. They could markup bands with hCards as well, though. Nevertheless good to see. :)

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Open Standards: Ma.gnolia as an Example

In the comments to the last short post on Ma.gnolia’s OpenID 2.0 adoption Matthias Pfefferle mentioned its use of microformats and other open standards. I just had a look at it and it’s quite impressive indeed.

The screenshot at the end of this post shows my Ma.gnolia profile. Content of that profile is marked up with these microformats:

microformats1

  • hAtom - for syndicating content
  • xFolk - for publishing collections of bookmarks
  • rel=”nofollow” - added to each link of the bookmarked sites indicating that search engines should not add weight to them
  • rel=”tag” - tags are indicated that way, of course
  • hCard - used to indicate who saved the bookmark, also contacts are marked up with hCards
  • XFN - links to my contacts are marked up with rel=”contact”
  • rel=”license” - indicating the use of a Creative Commons license
  • rel=”bookmark” - well, describes a bookmark
  • Also the datetime-design-pattern is used to describe the date a bookmark was saved.

Other standards supported are OpenID, MicroID, OAuth, and RSS. Since a couple of weeks it also support APML.

Those standards make it easy and comfortable for users to aggregate, share, publish, import, and export content, but also personal information like contacts and profile data. If more applications marked up content like Ma.gnolia, life was easier on the web.
Hopefully I have not forgotten any microformat or other standard supported. Update: Of course, I have forgotten some; added them to the list. Thanks Matthias!

magnolia profile

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