Tantek Çelik, the chief technologist at Technorati, talks about working at Microsoft on a Macintosh Product, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), microformats, developer wikis, and the growth of blogging and social networks.

Episode 14: Read Any Good Blogs Lately? >> See all videos in this series

Tantek Çelik, the chief technologist at Technorati, has plenty more credits to his name. He's also a leader in the microformats movement, has served on several W3C working groups, and worked at Microsoft to develop the Mac version of Internet Explorer. As you might imagine, that means he has a lot to say about development, particularly for the web. In our latest video in the Great Minds in Development Series, Çelik shares his opinions on all these topics.

First, microformats, which are arguably a key part of the Web 2.0 evoluation. HTML can format and display Web content but, Çelik points out, there's no language in HTML for expressing common concepts such as "appointment" and "address" in a way that search engines and other sites can recognize and use. Çelik goes into some detail about what these are and how they can help Web developers and designers improve site design.

Çelik is also a big fan of wikis, particularly the developer wiki on technorati, which he discovered before he joined the company. They're useful, he says, for figuring out "who's linking to the things I'm interested in reading." Originally, the technorati developer's wiki was set up as documentation on their API and to post links to their tools or source code, but it became much more than that: a collaborative commmunity. A wiki, Çelik says, is "like a CMS that you're inviting all your users and developers to take part in."

Community and collaboration are obviously a big part of the lifestyle for anybody who runs a site that tracks blogs. Çelik also spoke of the experience of participating in W3C working groups (he started on the CSS working group), which he describes as people working together to figure out "what's the best thing to do for the Web." You learn a lot, he says, from cutthroat competitors who sit in a room to work together on standards so that everybody on the Web benefits. "It's a really interesting balancing act."

Maybe you expected that; but you may not have realized, Çelik points out, the expertise that the W3C has about creating test suites. After all, one of the key things to ensure interoperability of standards is test suites that exercise software across all platforms and all user needs.

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