woot.com provides microsummary

woot.com now provides a microsummary of its home page showing the current product for sale on that site:

Three days ago I didn't even know woot.com existed. Now I not only know about it, I can see what it's selling every day with a glance at my bookmarks toolbar, and I've already bought something. Woot!

microsummaries talk at OSCON

I'll be giving a talk on Microsummaries at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) on Thursday, July 27, from 11:35am - 12:20pm in the Portland 251 room.  The talk will include an overview of microsummaries, a demonstration of their functionality in the upcoming Firefox 2 (including generators for popular web sites and sightings in the wild), a lightning tutorial on building a generator (à la this one), and discussion about future enhancements to benefit web sites and users.

It should be a fun and informative session, so please drop by if you're attending OSCON.  And if you're still just thinking about attending, note that Benjamin Smedberg will also be talking about building apps with XULRunner, Mitchell Baker will be on a panel discussing open source projects and money, and Mark Hammond will be presenting on Python in Mozilla.

Other Mozilla folks are also attending, and there'll be a BOF, a booth, a screening, and probably other exciting events and get-togethers, so it's a great opportunity to meet Mozillans and learn more about the project.  Check it out.

microsummaries beyond bookmarks

Folks at my XTech talk on microsummaries in May seemed excited by the new feature, and in discussion they pointed out a number of potential applications for microsummaries technology, including:

1. Simplifying web pages for blind users who have to walk DOM trees via screen readers to access page content.  One idea is to establish a repository of site-specific XSLT stylesheets that remove unnecessary content (f.e. redundant navigation) from pages, tag important content, and make other modifications to optimize navigability via screen readers.
   
2. Reorganizing web pages for mobile users with screen size and navigation constraints.  A common problem on mobile devices is that users have to scroll past screenfuls of navigation to get to the content of a page, since the navigation appears before the content in the page.  Here again we might establish a repository of XSLT stylesheets that move navigation to the ends of pages and do other transforms to make the pages display better on small screens.
   
3. Creating widgets that provide specific information or help you do particular tasks, à la Yahoo! Widgets, Opera Widgets, and Apple's Dashboard.  XSL transforms probably aren't sufficient here but could be a component in an overall solution.

These are all great ideas, and I'll be keeping their use cases in mind as I refine microsummaries functionality in Firefox.