One time, at Tag Camp…
So here we are at Tag Camp, an unapologetic Geekfest in an empty floor of an office building in downtown Palo Alto. The unifying theme is this seemingly innocuous concept of user-generated metadata called tags. Yet there are over 100 people here all (or nearly all) intoxicated by the simplicity of this powerful idea.
Some came with sleeping bags and backpacks (me amongst them) and others are just drop ins. There are a few VCs, a lot of entrepreneurs and designers, and even more engineers. I’ve run into several acquaintances including Anita Wilhelm, founder of Caterpillar Mobile, and her Berkeley SIMS compatriots. David Sachs from Trident Capital is here, reminding me that he vetted my old company Trapezo when we were pounding the pavement for VC back in 2000. Of course, Ryan King (Web2.0 or Not, Supr.cilio.us, Technorati) is here, because he’s absolutely everywhere. But I’m always glad to see him, unpretentious and insightful.
Kevin Marks, of Technorati, is currently giving a brief talk on Microformats. We’re currently usisng several of them on Urbantic, and I’m gratified to see we’re using the tag microformat correctly. They have a review microformat (hreview) which seems handy. There’s even an element for ratings.
Ryan is now talking about how microformats are explicitly solving the real work problems people are hitting, not theoretical problems. It’s a good point given the failure of high-falutin concepts like the Symantic Web which appealed to philosophers and academics but had little impact on how people built web sites.