The Mix 06 conference is a wrap. Between time spent at sessions and meeting some very cool and interesting people I was busy and really wish had more time to look around Las Vegas.
Among the speakers and attendees there were quite a few famous people (well in the web world anyway) and it was very intersting to talk about latest web technologies and what their own views about technology.
People I met and talked included Steve Main from the Indigo team [ http://hyperthink.net/blog ] , Phil Haack from Veloc IT [ http://haacked.com ], Tantek Çelik [ http://tantek.com ] and Marc Canter [ http://blog.broadbandmechanics.com/2006/03/bubble-story-from-mix06] from Broadband mechanics. Marc Canter is one of the most recognized people in the sphere of open standards, social networks and blogging, and he has been interviewed and quoted on the subject matter in numerous publications. Marc is a frequent speaker and panelist at conferences such as Web 2.0, SuperNova, Gnomedex, AlwaysOn Innovation, SXSW and many others. Marc is also a contributer to many open standards efforts and is champion for end-user controlled digital identities and content – being a co-founder of the Identity Gang. Marc hosted a impromptu session on Structured blogging and Microformats.
Microformats are a set of data formats in very simple form. The idea is not to throw away what works in todays formats but instead adapt to current behaviours and usage patterns. It was a very insteresting talk. What made it more interesting was that Bill Gates himself mentioned microformats in his discussion with Tim O’Reilly.
While discussing “Web 2.0?, Tim just said:
…the semantic web is really taking off with the use of microformats.
And in response, Bill said:
We need microformats and to get people to agree on them. It is going to bootstrap exchanging data on the Web…
…we need them for things like contact cards, events, directions…
It was interesting to hear Bill talk about “directions” microformats. In essence he was referring to mapping services provided by Yahoo, Google and MSN. I.E: Give directions by adapting to a user behaviour? To contribute go to this wiki here [ http://microformats.org/wiki/directions-examples ].
Other work in progress :
hReview is a simple, open, distributed format, suitable for embedding reviews (of products, services, businesses, events, etc.) in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hReview is one of several microformats open standards.
[ http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview ]
hCard is a simple, open, distributed contact information format for people, companies, and organizations, which is suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hCard is a 1:1 representation of the vCard standard (RFC2426 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt)) in XHTML, one of several open microformat standards.
[ http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard ]
The presentations given by the design companies such as Frog Design and Fluid, REZN8 included awesome WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) [ http://msdn.microsoft.com/winfx/reference/presentation/default.aspx ] based demos. One of the highlights was the North Face[ http://www.thenorthface.com/ ] store explorer kiosk application built by Fluid. These guys were pushing the boundaries of current media and graphic designs and providing visions to what next gen applications will be capable of.
New tools soon to be released by Microsoft specially for designers are Expression toolset which will be targeted for Graphic designers, Interactive designers and Web designers. [ http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx ] From what I saw and played with these were very cool.
Yes, I got to party with Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media.
I also got to meet Chris Auld (Kognition) from New Zealand. Thanks to Bryce Scanlan and team at Microrosoft NZ for giving me this opportunity to attend Mix06.
CK notes:
MIX 06 was held from March 20 to March 22, 2006. It focused on the new Internet Explorer 7 and WPF (a part called WPF/E later became known as Silverlight). It featured a keynote by Bill Gates in which he said, “We need microformats”.
chandima.net 