Microformats—What and Where?
Much of the data on Last.fm is marked up using microformats.
Events – hCalendar
All events, in sidebars or the center, are marked up as hCalendar. The url-part of the hCalendar markup points to the event overview page for that specific event.
On that page, many additional details, such as the full lineup (detail) or an optional end date, are available. The url-part on the event overview page points to an external page about that event, such as a bands’ tour page, and is optional.
Comments on that part of the implementation would be welcome.
Additionally, the location (venue) of the event is marked up as hCard. The url-part of that hCard links to the overview page of the venue, where every ounce of information we got about it can be found.
So if you want the full monty, follow the url for an event and parse on.
Venues – hCard
All the venues are marked up as hCard. Currently, we have the name, address details, a phone number and a link to the venue’s own website—most of which is optional. This information is located in the ‘about this venue’ panel on the top left.
Additionally, events happening at that venue are marked up as hCalendar. For more details about that, see above.
User Profiles – hCard
Details about users are available as hCard. The information is in the ‘about me’ panel on the left hand side. At the moment, we only support the name, country and URL for that hCard.
We may extend this in the future to at least include the the locality, the nickname and the photo (in form of the avatar) of the user.
Planned Stuff
Things we’d like to add but didn’t have time to are hReviews for events, albums and so on as well as XFN relationships for your friends, neighbours … and whatever else one could think of.
If you have any suggestions or wishes regarding what else could be marked up, please contact us. Especially Julian is all ears.
Licensing
All of the microformatted data is for non-commercial use only under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.
If you want to use these services in a commercial context you must contact partners at last dot fm first to get a seperate license.
Licensing Caveats
If the data you are using was generated directly by you (ie. it is your profile data, recent tracks etc) then you can do whatever you want with it. Don't worry about any licensing restrictions.
If the data was generated by Last.fm, or other users of the site, then you must abide by the CC license above (or a commercial license from us).
If you have ads on the site you wish to use this data on, you might be wondering does that count as commercial use?. If the ads are barely covering your running costs, we consider that non-commercial. Actually we consider most stuff non-commercial. If you are making a healthy profit from your site, and using this data to enhance the site, that sounds commercial. Any queries, just get in touch with us.
