Jason Kolb has put together a stunning example of how you can use microformats as opposed to just looking at them. First have a good read of his post and then try the following.

Head over to his MicroViewer demo and enter http://argolon.com/contact in the Source box and click “Load”. What appears is the Argolon Contact page but with a bunch of extra bits like the following.

The most obvious thing is sadly the Map link which uses Google. Despite having their European HQ in Ireland, only a few tiny squares of Ireland have been mapped by Google so clicking the map link will not work. Microsoft are way ahead of Google on this!

Next note the telephone number. If you click that, then it sets up a Skype call to my mobile.

The really impressive bit comes when you right click the little scissors. This is an implementation of Ray Ozzie’s (Microsoft’s CTO) Live Clipboard. When you right-click, select “Copy”. Now head on over to the Live Clipboard demo site, scroll down to the scissors with no name against it, right click the scissors and select “Paste”. All of my details suddenly appear on the page.

Of course this is just a demo but as I have said before, when this becomes part of the invisible plumbing of your browser or OS then moving and using this data becomes trivial.

This post is being written using the Flock browser. I will do a post soon on how it has the potential (still unrealised) to be the browser for your Dad and your Grandad. Adding support for microformats under the hood could be another step in that direction.

technorati tags:microformats, Live+Clipboard, hCard, MicroViewer, Ray+Ozzie

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