Tagzania Blog | News and Announcements

If you are familiar with microformats and you use Firefox, you may have heard of Operator, a great tool to manage information microformated accross the web. Well, we have now a userscript for Tagzania that lets you add microformated data to your maps, including  postal addresses that will be geocoded.
    
But most probably, if you haven't heard of microformats, you have the opportunity to learn more about them at the official site, you may come to know the very useful Operator tool (a plugin for Firefox, the browser that we always recommend), and we also invite you to have a look at the page we've set up explaining what the Tagzania userscript does.
    
In short, Operator enhanced with Tagzania gets contextual information from web pages. When addresses and geocoded information pieces are found, options appear in the menus of Operator to reuse that information. For instance, here's some business in Florida that uses microformats in its pages. You don't see those micro-things while browsing the page normally, but if you have the Operator installed, the bar will tell you how many encoded information it has found, while offering you displayable menus with options to reuse the data. Look at the screenshot:


    
Three addresses have been detected by Operator (as well as 3 hCard contact information sets and 6 calendar entries or events). The pulldown menu of the adr icon shows the options available for each of the addresses: there are several options there, two from Tagzania, you can see places that are near that place, or post that location to Tagzania.

Another of the options of Operator lets you highlight the pieces of microformated information found. In this screenshot, an address gets highlighted.



Using Firefox, you may right-click over that area, and again, the Tagzania options for the geocoded addresses will appear. Tagzania's options are available for the microformats geo and adr (for addresses). This last example is from the same webpage mentioned above, a business called Urban Body. Microformats may not be part of the mainstream web design practices now, but we're sure usage will increase. To see some examples, here you have some Brittish pages that use microformats. Of course, Tagzania itself is microformatted. Look at the new seven wonders of the world, the location of all of them (as of all items in Tagzania) is encoded following the geo microformat standard.
    
To get the Tagzania userscript, go here and follow installation instructions.