Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo
This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)
Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy
Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats
Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.
Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.
Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world
Technorati Tags: web2expo, microformats, B2B