ReadWriteWeb

Today marks the second annual "Blue Beanie Day," an international online event in support of web design standards and accessibility. Participants post photos of themselves wearing blue beanies, or stocking caps, to their various online accounts in honor of web standards guru Jeffrey Zeldman. Zeldman's blue beanie dominated the photo on the cover of his widely loved 2003 book, Designing With Web Standards.

We're big fans of web standards here at ReadWriteWeb and we'll tell you why.

Leave it to people in the wiki market to know how to collaborate. Nearly 20 different wiki providers have teamed up to offer a new Firefox extension that will notify users whenever they are on a page that is publicly editable, using a standard icon that sits in the same place the RSS autodiscovery icon appears. Clicking on the icon (img. on the left) will take you to that page's editing interface.

It's a great little idea that could help breath new life into the wiki community. We would love to see the extension become a standard part of Firefox.

How can people be sure that a blog comment left by "Bill Gates" is from the real Bill Gates? How does your lifestream aggregator know? Web developer Kyle Brady, creator of lifestream aggregator OneSwirl, has proposed a system he calls idAuth that he thinks addresses this issue. idAuth is a "push" system for data that can be linked to a specific identity. Theoretically, it would allow lifestream aggregators to collect data from across the web without the need for RSS/Atom feeds, and verify the validity of the id of the data owner.

TechCrunch and Search Engine Land are reporting this morning that Yahoo! will now be indexing Semantic Web and Microformats markup from around the web and will use that information to display more structured search results. Here is the Yahoo! post about the news.

We asked last month how vulnerable Google is in search and the leveraging of standards-based structured data may be the most obvious approach to improving on the search industry's current best practices. As Tim Berners-Lee said just weeks ago the time for the semantic web is now.

I've got serious reservations about applications that track my physical location, but Yahoo! made an impressive beta launch of its Fire Eagle service today that does just that. Fire Eagle is a platform that will allow other applications to incorporate location awareness into what they do.

The first two apps to engage with Fire Eagle is Dopplr, the super-hip social-travel app, and Danger Day, a service for updating your location on Twitter. Others are ramping up quickly, though Fire Eagle is still invite-only. We've got invite URLs posted at the end of this post, knock yourselves out. The Yahoo! Group for developers interested in Fire Eagle is here.