Thanks Peter and Felix for providing the venue. This time it's going to be a not-so-web-geek night - starting with rolling rubies on rails (thx pat). Then get the grill ready on time (bring your own food) to heat-up the scene for the Switzerland vs. French game. Sign-up on webtuesday.ch - see you there.

Posted by Cedric at 5/29/2006 11:04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Wouldn't it be useful to explore your local restaurants by the daily specials before roaming - or simply look-up a widget to make your preselection on the menu of your favorite place to eat?

I recently started thinking about using Microformats in combination with structured blogging to draw possible ways to kick this off.

Proposal process:

1. Restaurants publish the menu card on their web site using a simple Microformats mark-up
2. They blog the daily specials in their blog (again using the Microformats syntax)
3. Thanks to a Microformats enclosure in the RSS feed (or with spidering the web site) it would be easy for local search engines and restaurant guides to mash-up the fresh food feed with their content.

Of course it should be easy for restaurant owners to add their daily specials... using blogging/cms tools plug-ins.

Did anybody came across people already working on something like this? Any known standards in that space? Drop me a comment...

I'm going to start working on a draft spec for hMenucard...

Technorati Tags: microformats structuredblogging hmenucard

Posted by Cedric at 5/21/2006 02:13:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

The rather disappointing single-minded Personalized Search feature from Google got a very nice update this week. Adding community driven tagging and 3rd party source linking with Google Co-op. This makes it the first large scale search engine with user generated relevance ranking.

Tried to make use of the Subscribed Link feature to integrate local.ch in my Google searches.

Searching for "%yellow pages category% in %zip code%" should trigger the link in the SERP



Want to test it for yourself - subscribe to my co-op profile and your Google search results will feature the Subscribed Link.

Note: only works on google.com (make sure your are not on .ch or any other country). Only a limited amount of categories are working yet.. try restaurant, hairdresser, garage, carpenter, insurance, hotel, lawyer, dentist, architect.

The definition format is still limited for my taste (or it might need another RTFM)

Technorati Tags: googlecoop subscribedlink personalizedsearch

Posted by Cedric at 5/12/2006 12:01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post