I use several examples when I talk about content on the edge and how it applies to the work of organizational communicators. One example is the classified advertising service EdgeIO. Under the old model, you sent your classified ad to a newspaper because the newspaper’s reach exceeded that which you could achieve with a 3×5-inch index card tacked to a community bulletin board in a supermarket.

Along comes the web and the process stays exactly the same. Whether you use eBay or Craig’s List, you still send your content for publishing in a central location. EdgeIO changes that model by letting you publish to your venue—your blog. With so many people publishing on their own, the content exists on the edge. By adding an EdgeIO tag to your used car, your vacation rental, or your casting call for that great video podcast you’re going to produce, EdgeIO finds your listing and adds it. You don’t have to send them anything.

Microformats work the same way. When Neville Hobson, Joseph Jaffe, and I had our geek dinner in New York last June, I created a listing using microformat tags and it appeared automatically in a calendar of upcoming events over at the Technorati Kitchen.

Still, these examples are a bit confounding for the typical communicator. Now there’s an example that will be easy to explain. Shannon Whitley, the guy behind PRX Builder (a site that lets you use a wizard to build a social media press release) has introduced FetchWire. I think Shannon pitched me about it; I’ve had a note to self on my desk for a while reminding me to blog about FetchWire. So I went and took a look this afternoon and thought, “Edge content for press releases.”

That’s the idea. FetchWire touts its value proposition this way: “Post a news release to your blog. We’ll fetch it and display it.”

so you have a blog. You want to distribute a press release. Post the release to your blog (presumably a social media press release, of course), adding the appropriate tags. The tags can link to your blog post or your RSS (or Atom) feed. The folks at FetchWire insist that people are subscribing to the service’s feed through the use of keywords; they provide a TagBuilder tool to make sure you add the keywords to your post that people are using in their subscriptions.

The Discussion Tracker lets you see who has posted a blog item about the press release you “distributed” through FetchWire. This clearly is an opportunity to get spammed via blogs: Nearly all the tracker items listed under one press release were links to online pharmacies.

Still, the interface is clean, the categories make sense,

I have no idea how many people actually subscribe or whether FetchWire stands a chance of turning the wire service model on its head. But it’s a simple example of edge content I can use in my presentation. And, I believe it’s further evidence that there’s a future in edge content that offers communicators a real advantage.

I sense a “10 list” on the horizon: “10 uses of edge content for communicators.” Watch for it.

Comments

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).

That paragraph (and the rest of the page it came from) really does sum up microformats nicely. That it does so while leaving you still uninformed and clueless could be seen as mildly amusing for the cognoscenti, but probably is simply annoying and frustrating for everyone else.

Let’s take the mystery out of it: Microformats are nothing more (and nothing less) than using XHTML markup to more fully identify data. That’s it. No magic, no mumbo jumbo. Here’s an example:

If you “View Source” on this page, you’ll see that each section of that “hCard” is marked with a “class” tag:

<span class="postal-code"02346</span

Note what’s important here is the “class=”, not the “span” – the class could have just as well be applied to a <li> tag. But if that’s all there was to microformats, they’d just be another confusing tagging mechanism, no doubt complete with a monstrous XML schema that tried to be all things to all people. That’s the inherent problem of data tagging after all: who defines the tags?

Microformats sidestep that issue. If you noticed the very first tag, it references something that already exists and is in wide use:

<div class="vcard">

That “div” encloses the other data and defines the meaning of the inner class tags. Any program that already understands vCards can now extract data directly from this web page and import that data into itself. There are Firefox extensions that do just that.

Now go back and look again at that paragraph I quoted. Makes more sense now, doesn’t it? Apple has given this a nod in theor new .Mac webmail, and Firefox seems to be planning more microformat integration, as does Microsoft, so you’ll probably be hearing this term again.

See The Big Picture on Microformats also.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

Technorati’s chief technologist Tantek elik posted the news about Technorati’s new search for microformat content at the Technorati blog. elik characterized the debut as a welcome to “the realtime microformats web.”

People may be using microformats now without realizing it. The first implementation of microformats was Technorati’s rel=”tag” attribute, used to tag content by subject or author.

elik sees even greater potential now that microformats have begun to grow in number and utility. He explained how they will benefit millions of web publishers:

Three schema called hCard, hCalendar, and hReview have been made available from Microformats.org for others to use. Each schema allows a publisher to define the content of contacts, events, and reviews. Technorati’s new microformat search can be used to look for blogs and sites publishing content defined with these schema.

The Pingerati service works with sites that publish content and use microformats. Pingerati can handle microformat updates from any web page, whether it is a blog or not. Technorati’s existing ping service can pick up microformats from blogs, so nothing special needs to be done with those sites.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Ted put it in at some point, and with pretty much everything being optional it wasn’t too hard to do. Check out Powershot A50, which seems to have a fairly large number of quality user reviews.

Kick ass.

Microformats are slowly but surely going to create a whole new web of data, ripe for mining, indexing, and exploring.

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.