Microformats gone wild

Microformats seem to be showing up in more and more places lately. Chris spotted hCards in the new .mac web client.

Just this week, Last.fm announced a raft of updates including an events section that uses, yes, you guessed it, hCalendar. I did much the same thing when I added events to The Session recently.

I had been eagerly awaiting the unveiling of events (and accompanying microformats) on Last.fm since having a chat with some of the developers at that Opera shindig. I really like the implementation. If you follow through to an individual event, you’ll see some clever use of CSS to auto-generate a gig poster. Nice!

It’ll be interesting to see some mashups of Last.fm with Upcoming. With every event tied to a location, there’s also plenty of room for doing some fun mapping stuff. It would be nice to have an API to access the event data, but having all the events marked up in hCalendar means that we can start playing around with the data anyway.

Thinking about it, gigs are just about the perfect piece of data to play with: there’s always a date and there’s always a geographical location. Surely somebody will build a concert Mapendar?

At the very least, I expect we’ll see a time/location Podbop-style channel on Last.fm before too long.

Have you published a response to this? :

Previously on this day

14 years ago I wrote Bound for Cork

I’m going to be incommunicado for the next few days. I’m heading back to my hometown in Ireland.

15 years ago I wrote Viva La iPodDownload

I wrote a little while back about a nice little plug-in for iTunes called iPodDownload. It plugged a glaring usability hole in iTunes whereby you aren’t able to simply drag your music from your iPod to your computer.

16 years ago I wrote Oh my God, it's full of rock stars!

All went well with the Salter Cane concert last night. My bout of gastroenteritis had luckily passed by the time the gig rolled ‘round.

18 years ago I wrote The Brick Testament

Now, this is what the Internet was made for: Bible stories in Lego form.

18 years ago I wrote Movie industry dealt DVD-cracking blow

This is good news. The infamous DeCSS code is protected under free speech.

18 years ago I wrote Giant Sand

The Giant Sand concert was lots of fun.