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Operator, Could You Help Me Place This Call?
In last week's post, I discussed the promise of microformats and what they might be useful for down the road sometime. Well, I found something kind of useful involving microformats that's available now instead of down the road. It is a Firefox plug-in called Operator, and it can do some nifty things if the web site you are visiting is microformats aware.
Once I had installed Operator, I decided to try it out by searching for information on a favorite restaurant of mine, Croce's in San Diego, California. I searched Yahoo! Local for the address, and found the address. In my new toolbar, there was a drop down menu that could export the address:
That was pretty slick. Now the next time I'm in San Diego, I'll have the number with me and I'll be able to make a reservation without hunting down the number.
I searched Flickr for Croce's and came up with a picture of Jim Croce's guitar on the wall of the restaurant:
Better yet, this photo was geotagged, and so I was able to go directly to the location on Google Maps. Now THAT is really cool. Now whenever I see an image on Flickr, I'll be checking my toolbar to see if it was geotagged so I can see where it was taken.
I looked up A.J. Croce, Jim's son, on Upcoming.org to see if he was touring anywhere and found that he's going to be at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano next month:
I can export the address of the venue, see it on a map and add the event to my Google Calendar. Now that's starting to get pretty useful.
I'm probably not going to make it to San Diego or San Juan Capistrano anythime soon, so I guess I'll make due with an old clip of Jim Crocesinging Operator:
