Web 2.0 Best Practices

The topic of my conference this morning was Web 2.0 Best Practices. While a lot of the seminar was more applicable to sites with rich and oft-updated content, there were some really excellent tidbits that we can all learn from. 

The first big piece of news was the growing relevance of microformats, which are like XML cubed. By embedding specialized tags within content, search engines will read and aggregate the content differently. Yahoo, Google, and Firefox are all adopting this protocol this month.  Events, reviews, and personal profiles are just examples of content types that have special tags the search engines will parse and feedback to the rankings with higher priority.

The second big piece was about RSS, which I have tended to think of only in terms of news feeds. But RSS can be used for multimedia distribution as well. "Convergence" and our televisions becoming computers (and our computers becoming televisions) means that we can subscribe to media content in much the same way we subscribe to newsfeeds. The most concrete real-world example is podcast subscriptions on iTunes, but there are much more far-reaching potential opportunities "out there." Stuff to think about.

Bottom line, our current development processes are very "Web 1.0," we could really think about our clients' content differently with the right technical skills in house. But with an overall shift in separating content from form can go a long way to bringing our practices in line with current technologies.

My afternoon sessions were interesting but nothing to write home about. More tomorrow. If anyone wants my pass tomorrow at lunch time I'll be in the office for some meetings.