From Chris Messina comes a link to an article by Uche Ogbuji which is fairly critical of microformats. Uche seems to favour W3C technology so it’s unsurprising that he’d be able to pick holes with micromats. It’ll be interesting to see the response from microformat supporters.

Mike Butcher meanwhile reports on Freebase and it’s aim to monetise via API services. Freebase in their own words is:

“Freebase.com is home to a global knowledge base: a structured, searchable, writeable and editable database built by a community of contributors, and open to everyone. It could be described as a data commons. Freebase.com is enabled by the technology of Metaweb, which is described at www.metaweb.com.”

Mike mentions an article by Tim O’Reilly which is also worth visiting.

Brendan Lally over at web2ireland.org has some good news in the form of a competition from Intertrade Ireland. A total of €280,000 is being allocated for companies who compete in the following categories: Best emerging international company, Best emerging company, Best university spinout and Six regional prizes.

[Update]
Brendan has a stack of other posts worth mentioning on his own blog:

Irish / EU R&D funding for SMEs seminar, May 28th, Cork UCC, IRL

Irish VC Investment Slackens - Q1 2007

Business Angels have €20m to invest in startups - Dublin, IRL

What are microformats?

What is Twitter?

Sam Sethi of Vecosys and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency have had a few posts recently about microformats, the big news being that Twitter has incorporated microformats.

Sam:

• hAtomic soon to launch which is a community site for styling microformatted content
• Michael Kaply is officially the owner of microformat support in Firefox 3Twitter now supports microformats
• Twitter now supports hAtom and hCard

Chris:

• Twitter adds support for microformats
• mofo - a ruby microformat parser

Microsoft announced Silverlight earlier this week, to general acclaim.

What’s not obvious from some of the coverage thus far, however, is that the platform demoed at Mix07 will ship in two parts: Silverlight 1.0, to be released sometime this summer; and Silverlight 1.1, to be released at some point thereafter. In the keynote (NB: Windows Media Player link), Scott Guthrie, GM of the Silverlight team, refers to this merely as “Beyond Summer 07.”

It’s the 1.1 release (given that it seems something of a quantum leap over even v1.0, they could almost refer to it as Silverlight 2.0 - and, who knows, they might do, yet) which contains the .NET Runtime support which, in turn, might (finally!) consign Javascript-as-a-general-purpose-programming-language to the dustbin of history.

If Silverlight (or something like it/better than it) takes hold, then I can imagine a time when you simply will not be able to convince a recent CS graduate of just how pointlessly difficult programming the Web once was.

Congratulations to Conor of Argolon on the launch of LouderVoice. LouderVoice makes it easy to write reviews particularly if you blog.

If you like what you see then how about voting for LouderVoice at TheNextWebConference (Amsterdam, June). And if you get that far Walter Higgins of Pixenate would probably appreciate a vote!