Yelp…is…essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings.
There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?
Firefox Improved RDF Browsing
lbjay uses both the Tabulator and Semantic Radar Firefox plugins to do magic with RDF in his browser.
How Do I Create A Semantic Web Site?
A member of the Web4lib mail list asked: How do I create a semantic web site? I know I have to use either RDF or OWL but do I use either of these to create a mark up language which I then use to create the web site or, with the semantic web do we […] » about 700 words
A Visual Explanation of Web 2.0
Kansas State University‘s Digital Ethnography group — “a working group of Kansas State University students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography” — posted this visual explanation of Web 2.0. It’s by Michael Wesh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology, and it rocks.
Text is unilinear…when written on paper.
Digital text is different.
Hypertext can link.
With form seperated from content, users did not need to know complicated code to upload content to the web.
Who will organize all of this data? We will. You will.
Digital text is not longer just linking information…Web 2.0 is linking people…people sharing, trading, and collaborating.
We’ll need to rethink a few things…
Thanks to the Google Operating System blog for bringing this to my attention.
Microformats
Oliver Brown introduced me to microformats a while ago, the Ryan Eby got excited about them, then COinS-PMH showed how useful they could be for libraries, but I still haven’t done anything with them myself (other than beg Peter Binkley to release his COinS-PMH WordPress Plugin). What are microformats? Garrett Dimon explains the theory: When […] » about 300 words
Geolocation Stumbling Block: GeoURL Host Down
A an old John Udell piece at InfoWorld hints at GeoURLs, but the GoeURL site is down, and has been for a while. The concept sounds interesting: you mark pages with coordinates, then use GIS to map those pages to geographic locations, finding pages and people of interest along the way.
To join GeoURL, you add this kind of metadata to your homepage:
I got interested in this sort of thing (geolocation) a while back, and I haven’t quite given up.
Update: Bjørn is right, GeoURL is back and I should have updated this post ages ago. Look here for more about geolocation on MaisonBisson. …And Bjørn’s website is worth a look too.