‘rel=license’: Creative Commons’ machine-readable code explained
I’m at the New Context Conference in Tokyo produced by Digital Garage and superbly hosted by iCommons Chairman, Joi Ito. It’s been a fascinating event with insights into the future of Web 2.0 from the perspective of internet theorists and pioneers.
Yesterday I listened to Technorati Chief Technologist, Tantek Ã?elik talking about ‘microformats’. Technorati helps you find out what bloggers are saying about you - as you can see here with a search for iCommons on technorati.com.
Tantek defines microformats as ‘Small bits of (X)HTML that identify richer data types like people and events in your webpages’.
For me, the most exciting thing about his talk was that, for the first time, I truly understand the code behind the licences that power cc search.
Tantek believes that its really important to keep the web simple. He explained how the ‘rel=license’ microformat tagging system is being supported by Yahoo!, Google and the cc search largely because of its simplicity. You’ll notice that if you ‘choose license’ on creativecommons.org, you’ll see both the RDF and ‘rel=license’ tags which operate behind the scenes to tag cc content as free to share and/or remix by others.
Other microformats that are gaining ground include events tagging and contact information - both of which we’ll be starting to integrate into icommons.org. All the microformats are available under Creative Commons licences - as well as many of the presentations on the microformats wiki page.
Tantek thinks that microformats are powerful because they are ‘Building blocks that enable users to own, control, move, and share their data on the Web.’ He took a photograph of me writing up my first first hCard here using this simple hCard Creator. Having learned to write html a few years back and then feeling completely left behind after that, I feel pretty empowered 
Photograph: Tantek Celik, CC BY-NC 2.0