Have you missed some event lately because the information about events is dispersed and fragmented and it’s boring to have to type things in your calendar?
I will show you how to improve the scheduling of activities in an online calendar by automating much of this process by using Microformats.
Microformats enable machine readability but additionally add meaning to chunks of text and other data. That means that these chunks of information also become machine ‘understandable’. In turn, this leads to automated processing of semantically useful data.
The implications for building an Artificial Intelligence with the Semantic Web are staggering but in the meantime, I just want to tell you about a practical application of Microformats which is useful today itself, namely how to make good use of the hCalendar Microformat.
What you should use:
1. Firefox. You are using Mozilla’s Open-Source Firefox, aren’t you? If not download it.
2. Operator. A Firefox extension or addon by Michael Kaply of IBM, which detects Microformats and enables you to act on them. Install it and restart Firefox and restore your session to come back here. Michael just opened up Operator’s source code. Thanks for that and for Operator Michael.
3. Google Calendar. Get an account with Google and login.
4. Upcoming.org. Yahoo’s event site which has support for Microformats.
On installing Operator and relaunching Firefox, you should have a new thin toolbar. Mine shows: [Export Contact | Google Calendar | Google Maps | Flickr | Del.icio.us | Technorati]
Now, head to upcoming.org and as search tags, type in, for instance, ‘Montreal’. This should list all events locally. It would be much more helpful if upcoming.org also provided Microformats on this list of events but currently it doesn’t.
Click one of these events. For this example, I chose the forthcoming Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast II launched by Ben Yoskovitz.
Operator detects the hCalendar Microformat content and add “(1)” next to the [Google Calendar] button among other things.
Click on this button and the events information is automatically added to Google calendar’s event form. You can then save the event into your calendar.
Voilà . You now have a way to rapidly find and integrate events within your online Calendar with nothing to type – just clicks.
Now, it would be more interesting if people blogging about events would take the time to add Microformats to the information. One way to do this is to use the hCalendar Creator by Ryan King, based on previous work by Tantek Çelik. It also automatically add tags so that you can found similar events on eventful.com, another web service which is also using Microformats. Similarly here, Eventful does not provide the Microformat information in the list view.
Check my past post about DemoCampMontreal1. Operator detects it immediately because that informative chunk of text was microformatted with hCalendar information by using the hCalendar creator.
You can read more about Operator on Michael’s blog and on the Mozilla blog.
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