From the swivellin' chair...

I found out yesterday about microformats, a standard set up to enable easy sharing of content from websites.

One of the main examples is their hCard format. Many of you might already be familiar with vCards, a format used to share your contact information with other people. Apple's Address Book will open the file and automatically add a contact. hCard takes this a step further and allows users to 'Save a contact' when viewing their profile on a website. Depending on what information is provided, this could include their name, phone number, website, location you name it.. In our case, we have some of that information available for many of our users. Considering the implementation of hCard implementation is quite simple, I went ahead and added it to all Travellerspoint member profiles.

Firefox 3 is expected to have microformat support embedded, but till then you can install this FF 2 Add On that will do the trick nicely.

After installing that Add On, navigate to a Travellerspont member's profile, for instance mine. You will see the 'hCard' icon in your toolbar light up to indicate that it has found some contact information. Clicking on that will give you some options of things to do with the data.

This is not a change that will immediately seem useful to many of you, but I'm convinced that over the next year or so it is going to become a standard way of gathering contact information.