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The semantic web balloon race

lots of balloons A balloon with an address card tied on with string, shares a striking resemblance to a microformat. The microformat is a balloon with the address card inside it, which, when filled with the helium of ‘general acceptance in web browsers‘, allows the address card to travel miles and wind up in unknown places.

A greater awareness of the sheer usefulness of being able to toss little bits of information around like a balloon patted from person to person, will prompt people to begin finding new ways to share that info. It’s very tempting to wander off into a bit of future gazing at this point, but I would ask you to think about ways that your collection descriptions can start to live a life of their own, being tossed around the internet and eventually landing up in unexpected places.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 20:18 and is filed under Library. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “The semantic web balloon race”

  1. Blogschrott - » Microformats - the way to go! Says:
    January 2nd, 2007 at 22:43

    [...] Weitere Infos zu Mozilla und MF hier, hier, hier und hier [...]

  2. Andy Harmer Says:
    January 26th, 2007 at 20:18

    Quite unbelievable that you don’t see this as environmentally irresponsible. Where do you think this litter ends up? If you don’t know then why not ask the animal hospital charities who regularly do post mortems on aquatic mammals and reptiles to see what’s killed them.

  3. Tim Hodson Says:
    January 26th, 2007 at 22:36

    Hi Andy.
    I was using the image of a balloon race as a metaphor to describe the way that information in a microformat can be found in unexpected places. And, extending the metaphor somewhat, those unexpected places can also be undesirable places.

    I in no way intended to condone physical balloon racing.

  4. Andy Harmer Says:
    February 8th, 2007 at 13:28

    Hey Tim

    Bet you’ve got a metaphor for someone like me who jumps to conclusions before reading the text?!