It’s been two years since we threw the switch and launched microformats.org. In year two the community has accomplished some incredible results. So many that I can’t hope to list them all. You’ll just have to check the wiki changes for yourself ;) Here are five (mostly quite recent) items of note from the past year:

The Operator Firefox Extension by Michael Kaply. If you haven’t already, download and install Operator into your Firefox browser ASAP. If you don’t have Firefox, go get it. Operator, simply put, is perhaps one of the (if not the) best ways to view, study, use, and test the microformats that you find on numerous sites and author yourself.

“Microformats” book published. The first full book on Microformats, written by microformats community member John Allsopp, was published and extremely well received.

Hundreds of millions published. According to Ben West of Alexa over 450 million microformatted pieces of information have been published on the Web. Caveat: that does include mostly rel-help, which itself is in HTML4.01 so it’s not really a microformat. Thus we round down to the imprecise “hundreds of millions”.

First hCard profile import implemented! Mere days ago, Satisfaction Inc. implemented a really nice user interface for signing up (screenshot) that lets you pick your existing hCard-supporting profile on sites like Cork’d, Last FM, Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, Yedda etc. to fill out such basics as your name, your user icon, and URL.

First XFN+hCard social network import implemented! Mere hours ago, maybe a day ago, Dopplr.com, a currently invite-only travelplan sharing site, implemented the ability to import your contacts from any other site that publishes your contact list with hCard for the people and XFN for your relationship(s) to them, instead of having to manually find and re-add everyone to yet another site. Here is a screenshot of the results.

Well done everyone!

I’m truly looking forward to seeing what we get done in year number three.

See also: Chris Casciano’s post: Microformats Hit 2, Entering Maturity.

It’s certainly old news by now, (since when are we on the cutting edge here?) but there’s a book out dedicated entirely to microformats.

Written by John Allsopp and published by Friends of Ed, Microformats: Empowring Your Markup for Web 2.0 covers everything you need to know about microformats, from how they’re built (the process) to how to publish and parse them. Include are two case studies, one about corkd, another about Yahoo.

I haven’t read the entire book yet, but still I’d recomend it to anyone interested in microformats. John’s a great writer, and he built a great supporting cast for this book– it was tech edited by Brian Suda and includes contributions from Dan Cederholm and Nate Koetchly, among others.

Even if you feel you wouldn’t learn anything from the book, at the very least you can show it to your manager and say “look, it must be important, they’re writing books about it!”.

Links for the book:

• John’s page
• The publisher’s page
• Buy it on Amazon

The Web 2.0 Expo is taking place at Moscone West on 747 Howard Street in San Francisco, California from April 15th to 18th. Microformats will be well represented.

John Allsopp, author of the newly published Microformats book from Friends of ED, is scheduled to speak on Tuesday. John’s presentation is called Microformats, Much More Than Just Promise. The time is currently set for half past one. John will be looking at current implentations of microformats as well as asking what applications remain unexplored..

There’s also a presentation called The Beauty in Standards and Accessibility on Tuesday at 3:45… I’m sure microformats will get slipped in there at some stage.

The schedule for the conference seems to be still in flux so keep your eyes and calendar apps tuned to the microformats events calendar.

Piggybacking on the conference, there’ll be a microformats dinner early on Wednesday evening. A location hasn’t been finalised yet but there are some suggestions on the event’s wiki page. If you’re in town, please come along.

The microformats community is growing extremely fast. New people are joining the mailing lists and wiki every day and contributing their work towards a better authored web.

In light of this growth, we’ve added a new mailing list, called ‘microformats-new‘, which is now the best venue for talking about the development of new formats.

The reason we decided to create this list is that we’ve found that the group of people who want to work on new formats is a rather distinct subset of all of those involved with microformats. It’s valuable work, but it’s not for everyone.

A bumper round up of microformats from 4th–17th December 2006

New implementations

• Alex Faaborg of Mozilla Labs has announced availability of ‘Operator’, a Firefox extension written by Michael Kaply at IBM (download from Firefox Add‑ons). Operator detects hCard, hCalendar, geo, hReview and rel-tag and allows you to combine those microformats with desktop applications and web services such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Calendar. Alex has also written some accompanying introductions to microformats and collected comments in mozilla.apps.dev.firefox.
• Also for Firefox, the popular Tails extension has been updated to 0.3.6.
• Nick Peters has written a Greasemonkey script called Social xFolk to highlight xFolk microformatted bookmarks. It appends ‘Add to Delicious’ and ‘Add to Magnolia’ buttons in the page.

On the Wiki

• Andy Mabbett has started work on an hReview cheatsheet. It’s a work‑in‑progress and he’s asked for help in getting it completed and validated.

From uf-discuss

• Ted Drake is interested to see if the recipes microformat brainstorming can move on with a request for real-world examples and experiments
• With Mars and the Moon getting in the news, Andy Mabbett has redrawn attention to the Mars and Luna extensions to Geo.
• Jason Garber asked about rel=”muse” in XFN, wanting a means to indicate professional respect towards a person, rather than ‘romantic’ respect. For clarification, that category of values in XFN is ‘romantic’ as-in ‘romanticism’, and are not intentionally restricted to love-interest.
• Off the back this XFN discussion came discussion about a so-called ‘XPN’ (an ‘XHTML Professionals Network’ microformat). In response to this, there’s interest in identifying real-world implementations that could benefit by publishing professional relationships (think employee/employer, clients, sub-contractors and so forth). If you are involved with or know of sites that could harness such distributed professional networking, please get in touch on the list.
• Taylor Cowan is looking for more semantic detail on Q&A mark-up; going beyond the humble definition list. As usual, real-world examples are collected on the wiki and discussion should take place on the list.

On the web

• Following the healthy bloom of new cheat-sheets Brian Suda has updated his Microformats Cheatsheet PDF.
• Roger L Costello has created a comprehensive hCard presentation (using S5). Not only does it provide an introduction to using hCard it also provides detail on use of class="value" for properties, and the flexibility enabled by an oft‑overlooked feature.

‘This week in microformats’ aims to highlight the most active microformats discussion published in the preceding week by monitoring the microformats discuss mailing list, and the microformats tag on Technorati (and elsewhere). If you’d like to alert the editors to something, add a ‘thisweekinmicroformats’ tag.