Microformats by John Allsopp

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Good Primer on Microformats

Before reading this book, I had a very high level understanding of microformats but never felt well versed enough to have any indepth conversations. The book begins with a two introductory chapters on the concept, history and significance of microformats as well as what is ’state of the art.’

John then proceeds to the author walking through a number of specific common microformats including hCard, XFN and hReview. While the review of the different formats certainly is skimable and can be returned to later for reference, John also leverages his significant CSS experience to provide some cool trips and tricks for different ways to style up the data in a browser.

John concludes with two case studies on web properties that have extensively leveraged Microformats - Yahoo and Cork’d - (actually interviews with leaders at these companies.) Finally, he concludes with the last chapter on Developing Microformats.

If you’re interested in a quick primer on microformats, I’d strongly recommend this book.

PS: You’ll notice both of these reviews are written in HReview microformat, so you I’m at least trying to practice what I preach. I did cheat and install Andrew Scott’s plugin.

My rating: 4.0 stars

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

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Jessica is probably best know as one of the co-founder Y Combinator. However, she released this book about a year ago and it’s been on my list to read ever sense. The book is organized as a series of 32 interviews with a variety of entreprenuers. The nice thing is each chapter is a unique interview, so it’s easy to jump around the book to the interviews that are most interesting to your. I read most of them, although ended up skimming a few of the ones I found less interesting.

It’s nice to hear a number of entreprenuers talk so authentically about their experience founding each of their respective companies. Hopefully this is similar to the experience listeners have with Read/WriteTalk.

Two quotes really stand out from the interviews including:

1. David Heinemeier Hansson from 37 Signals on their approach to launches and subsequent releases

We always give a major update within 30 days after we launch a new product … So for us, one of the secrets about how we market the product is to make sure that launch is not the end.

2. Tim Brady the first employee at Yahoo! on the company’s early approach to looking bigger than it was. (due to the addition of Jeff Mallet)

We started doing two red-eyes a week to New York for business … we worked harder, smarter and faster… being everywhere all the time made up look bigger than we were.

I like both of these quotes, because they are part of my goals for myself this year at mSpoke. I want to make sure we continue to innovate quickly (announcement coming soon) and act in the marketplace like we want to be perceived (maybe not two red-eye a week, but we’ll be participating) even if we are still a growing startup.

Also, don’t overlook the introduction that Paul Graham (Jessica’s co-founder at Y Combinator.) He gives a great analog for entrepreneurship, but you’ll have to pick up the book for it

My rating: 4.5 stars