Skillswap report
On Tuesday I spoke at the February 2007 edition of Bristol Skillswap at The Watershed. I think it was the first time I’d given a public presentation, though I’ve given a few talks at work. There were about 25 people there, which was a sufficiently large number to elicit questions and feedback but not so large as to be intimidating.
The subject of my talk was “Microformats: The Semantic Web for the Rest of Us”, and the slides are available online in lovely s5 format (a simple html file plus CSS and Javascript magic).
I managed to bag a couple of beers (for later consumption, I should add - I thought it best to be compos mentis during the talk itself) and then began the presentation. I described what the Semantic Web is, what Microformats are and what the point of it all is before showing some real-world examples. The main, meaty part, though, was to dive into some HTML and add some Microformats for contact information and events – the two Microformats I know best.
In the end, the talk ran to about an hour (which I’d hoped it would, but I wasn’t sure). There was a good amount of questions and feedback, and several of us carried on the discussion in the Watershed bar afterwards. I’m not sure how well it’ll come out on video, but never mind!