everyday

The Gorillapod is an amazing looking little tripod for any size camera. They come in three sizes, one for point-and-shoot, SLR, and SLR with a zoom lens. This looks like it could be a very useful product and I may be reviewing one in the future (the price is even not too awfully terrible).

Apple Inc. has released an update to their awesome wireless router, the Airport Extreme. What is the big deal? Well, the old Airport Extreme was cool, but the new one is even better. It includes 802.11n (faster wireless), and the ability to hook an external hard drive up and share it with multiple computers wirelessly!

What are Microformats? Why are they cool? Who cares? I shall attempt to answer these questions.

Microformats are simple data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Think, business cards for email or appointment items in your favorite calendar application. While these are two simple examples, microformats are much more than this. With Microformats a person can take their existing content and give it more meaning by using more semantic markup which will allow the machine to understand what the information is without any user interaction.

Why are they cool? They will, if widely adopted, allow for a richer web-based experience for the end user. Imagine visiting my blog, clicking on a link and adding my contact info (or my weblogs contact info) to your address book in Gmail. You could visit the website of a club or team and add an event to your online calendar by, again, click on a single link.

Why do you care about microformats? Well, maybe you don’t, but I suspect that if they take off, you will begin to care. I can see myself re-coding my blog (just a little) to include some aspects of microformats in the very near future. Currently I tag my blog entries with something relevant to the story for easily sorting through stories by category (or tag). Until microformats came about, there was no standardized way to let an indexing site (like Technorati or Digg) know that a tag is a tag. Microformats will allow the web, and the content in it, to have more meaning. When visiting a site, your web browser will know know more about the information you are viewing and will, in turn, allow you to do more with it without having to actually do more.