the ryan king

I’m sitting at CTTP right now, preparing for my last exam of the semester, which I have to take earlier than the rest of the class. Though everyone else is taking the exam next week, I have to take it tomorrow. Why? I’m takin’ a little trip.

Sunday, I leave for Amsterdam, where I’ll be attending XTech. Brian and I are giving a tutorial on microformats, and I’m also giving a talk on designing microformats.

After XTech, I’m going to be handing around at BarCamp Amsterdam II.

After BarCamp, I’m flying up to Edinburgh for WWW 2006, where I’m not presenting, but just going as a representative of Technorati and microformats.

After www2006 is done, I’m headed down to London for a few days for some R&R (or something close to that). If you’re gonna be around any of these times/places, let me know, I’d love to meet up.

For a long time I’ve been suggesting/threatening that we have a weekly IRC meetup for microformateers. We have an IRC channel for discussing microformats, but rarely do we have the critical mass of active participants sufficient for having ongoing conversation. I believe that WordPress developers do something similar and they were my inspiration for the idea.

When I met Dan Connolly at SxSWi last month, I realized that he was extremely willing to work on microformats, but needed to schedule out time to coordinate. So, since I couldn’t get the idea of a weekly meetup off the ground, I came up with a simpler idea– I scheduled a weekly time, in which I’d commit to being in the microformats IRC channel for at least an hour.

So, at 2PM (Pacific Time) on Wednesdays I’m always in the IRC channel. The only other regulars to stop by are Dan and Brian, but we’ve been able to crank out a bunch of hCard and hCalendar test cases and bugfixes for X2V.

I suspect that, at some point, this may grow into more than just “office hours” for me; it may grow into a full-fledged meetup.

Moral of this story? If your idea isn’t working, try a simpler one.

Duh.

See Dan’s related post.

Last night, Technorati won Technical Achievement and Best in Show at the South by SouthWest Web awards.

I got to go up on stage and accept the awards with Tantek and I have to say we’re totally surprised. In all, its been great to meet Technorati users here at SxSW, they’re all interesting people who seem to love Technorati, which makes all the hard work (mostly done by people other than me) worth it.