Ian Muir :The Angry Scotsman

Today's LunchBreak is dedicated to Strong Bad, the greatest Flash-based Mexican Wrestler cartoon character on the web.

Poor Trevor - Please pay respects to poor Trevor the Vampire
Sugarbob - Never trust Strong Bad with your lady
Ally or Ally's Sister - This was my first exposure to Strong Bad, awesome.
GUITAR - JUG JUGGA JUG JUGGA JUG
Trogdor - Quite possible the most famous of all Strong Bad emails.

I was pondering some ideas about the connected web concept I mentioned in a previous post and I was thinking about how it could be applied to the music industry. More specifically independent bands and musicians.

I'm both a muscian and a fan of several local bands. There's currently no system in place for finding information about my favorite bands. To see whos playing in my area, I have to visit each band's site individually. This seems pretty silly since each band's site has almost the exact same information on it.

Enter MicroFormats. Microformats provide a standardized system for sharing data about Events, Reviews, Addresses and many other content types. Having a common format for these content types provides a lot of potential for syndication. These microformats can also be easily generated by most systems because they contain fields common to each content type.

Back to our music example. If bands started syndicating their concert dates using the events microformat, I could easily create an app that could read in the syndicated concert info from my favorite bands. Bands could also make use of Microformats. They could search various Review feeds for reviews related to them and display them on their site.

It's easy to see that Microformats provide an excellent opportunity to improve connectivity between a wide variety of applications. New ideas with kind of potential always get me stoked. I'm excited to see what evolves from these microformats over the next year.

Welcome to the fabulous LunchBreak section.

This first post is dedicated to some of my favorite old school time-wasters.

I Love Bacon - Lots of funny photos from around the world.

ThinkGeek - A fantastic array of geek toys and cubicle accessories
Jinx - More geek apparel and some of the best t-shirts around.

That's it for today. Tomorrow is “Best of Strong Bad” day.

Mix06 started today in Vegas, and I unfortunately couldn't go. I've been keeping tabs on things and it looks like it's a big step in the right direction for the people at Microsoft. So far over the past year, Microsoft has made significant improvements to .NET with the 2.0 framework, released a free version of Visual Studio and sponsored many contests focused around CSS and other web standards.

A few people from Ektron are there and my CTO was nice enough to send me this pic.

So, at least some of my design work is at Mix even though I couldn't make it.

Atlas
For those who don't know, Atlas is an extension of ASP.NET designed for creating AJAX applications. It includes both a client-side library for creating cross-browser AJAX objects and server side code for creating optimized web services to provide content to client.

Today at Mix, Microsoft release the March CTP of Atlas and announced a contest for developing an Atlas Mash-Up.

So I was poiking around on Jinx, and I happened upon this great shirt

I fully intend to get this shirt. It can be found at http://www.jinx.com/scripts/details.asp?affid=-1&productID=229