Just about to give a presentation ... but on what?

On Thursday I gave a quick talk on microformats to the assembled hordes of Product Operations in Yahoo! Europe (this department contains project management, web development, design and user research — people who actually build websites).

The basic structure of the talk was:

1. use a couple of quotes taken from the what are microformats? page, and one from Jeremy Keith's talk In Praise of the Hyperlink to introduce the concept
2. quickly describe the W3C's Semantic Web (note capitalisation) vision and progress over the past five years
3. describe the progress made in just over one year by microformats in creating the semantic web (note lower case)
4. note adoption of microformats by some small EU Yahoo! properties and some big US Yahoo! properties
5. briefly name and describe some microformats (without code examples)
6. show how hCard can be used by the Technorati contacts feed service to take the list of speakers from this year’s d.Construct and them to my address book
7. show how hCalendar can be used by the Technorati events feed service to take the schedule from this year’s d.Construct and add it to my calendar
8. take questions from the audience

End result — a few more people at Yahoo! Europe understand exactly what microformats are and why I consider them important; a handful are now excited enough to go learn more (and not just in the web development team); and I should learn to save my Keynote files before rebooting my machine.