My personal thoughts on the microformats community at the start of 2009, where we might go, where I’d like us to go, and the kinds of new developers I hope get offered to developers. I hope it inspires others to write up their own ambitions for the year.

This week’s issue of the excellent Digital Web Magazine leads with an article I’ve written about Distributed Social Networking, published under the title Portable Social Networking: Building Blocks of a Social Web

At BlogTalk back in March and again at BarCamp London 4 last week I did a session on the foundations of Distributed Social Networking; a simple guide through the basics of describing ourselves and social relationships with XFN and hCard and how they can be pulled together to do some first-step but useful things.

I’m not [...]

After a slightly longer drafting period than I’d planned, my article Kelkoo goes microformatic has gone live on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

It’s a lengthy piece on the recent redevelopment of Kelkoo and the microformats we added to it. It’s focused on the consumption of the formats though; putting them to use to build a [...]

Lately I’ve somewhat failed at blogging. Not in a colloquial meme ‘FAIL’ manner, in an actual if-you-put-me-in-a-competition-and-judged-me way. The lack of activity in both redesign and writing would have this site reclassified as a holding page for some other Ben Ward who would later poach the domain name from my idle mitts.

The advantage to being [...]