Sperrobjekt Weblog

First, there was Optimus, now Glenn Jones at lab.backnetwork brings us ufXtract, another online Microformats parser. It was created with a specific goal in mind, namely in order to help explore the real world issues of creating portable social networks. So, for a start, ufXtract's main focus seems to be a set of Microformats related to social networking: hCard and XFN, rel-me, rel-next, and hAtom; but it can detect many others as well, even the quite complex hResume. Output formats comprise plain text, XML, and JSON. ufXtract is written in C# and seems to be pretty fast, although I cannot really compare its performance to that of Optimus.

I think this is great work by Glenn, and I'm curious about the demos he is going to add. Go ahead and check it out yourself, or click on one of the following links to see some demo output of this blog's contents:

• JSON output of this blog's hAtom/hEntry
• XML output of this blog's hCalendar
• List of this blog's tags

Microformats gain momentum, slowly (maybe more slowly than expected) but steadily. Now Christian Heilmann created a mashup of hCard and Google Maps aptly called hcard2gmap. The javascript parses a web page for hCards with geo information and relays these data to Google Maps where the contacts are being displayed by markers. Great stuff, more applications like this, please! Check out the demo here.