[microformats-discuss] RelPayment: Requesting comments

[Joshua Kinberg]

Re: difference b/n "payment" and "tip jar":
- tip jar = pay *me*
- payment = more general form of contribution
(which I do see as financial support, so I disagree with Andreas there)

I've included rel="payment" links in the last three entries on my
weblog (http://joshkinberg.com). None of them are specifically to pay
*me*.

One is to donate to someone else's theater project, another is to
purchase a CD on Amazon of music that was included in the video i
posted (I could have used an affilliate link here but didn't), the
other is to support NPR and encourage viewer to buy something at the
NPR shop (I posted an audio interview from NPR).

None of these use cases would make sense as a "tip jar".
All of them make sense as "payment".

My 2 cents.

-Josh


On 8/8/05, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com> wrote:
> On Aug 8, 2005, at 12:17 PM, Andreas Haugstrup wrote:
> > On Mon, 08 Aug 2005 20:08:10 +0200, Ryan King <ryan at technorati.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > From the bottom:
> >> Andreas- please dont' take my criticism as harsh, I want to see
> >> this format succeed.
> >
> > I don't. :o)
> >
> >> 1. The name - the referenced url isn't really a "payment," but a
> >> place for someone to make a payment. Perhaps "tip jar" would be a
> >> better metaphor. I think this also helps to communicate that the
> >> payment is not required, but a donation. Additionally, the spec
> >> says: "RelPayment is meant as a general way to facilitate acts of
> >> support, and thus this specification makes no assumptions on the
> >> type of support." So why not have a more general name?
> >
> > I don't think the name is a problem. Payment doesn't imply
> > financial payment, and the fact that content is visible without
> > paying makes it quite clear that payment isn't mandatory. A
> > 'tipjar' on the other hand has a strong connotation of a financial
> > donation.
> 
> Right. And isn't that what's going on here?
> 
> > A more general term like 'support' just seems weak to me (and in
> > that instance 'support' probably has a stronger connotation of
> > 'help' rather than 'give me some money here').
> 
> I don't see anything wrong with the 'help' connotation.
> 
> I have a feeling there's others who dislike the name 'payment' here.
> Any thoughts?
> 
> >> 2. Visbible metadata++ :)
> >
> > Thank you. That was my working. :o)
> >
> >> 3. Is there anyone, anywhere who's done anything similar?  I
> >> honestly don't know and I don't know that anyone else has done the
> >> research.
> >> You see, a very important part of the microformat ethos is the
> >> principle of reuse (or principle of non-invention)- meaning that
> >> we reuse as much as possible and only invent new markup/semantics
> >> when necessary.
> >
> > This was something I knew someone was going to point it out, but I
> > was sort of hoping they wouldn't. I'm not one of the concept guys -
> > I'm just a loud voice - but it's my understanding that the idea for
> > a RelPayment didn't grow out of the microformat idea of "Making the
> > data that people *are already publishing* on the *web* more
> > useful". It came from people writing RSS readers for videoblogs who
> > wanted to help their content creators.
> >
> > Videoblog aggregators suck a lot of bandwidth (especially the ones
> > that download everything automatically), and when people read/view
> > through the RSS reader any "payment" links that may have been
> > present are at best hidden in text somewhere at worst removed. The
> > programmers wanted to give something back to the content creators
> > by giving them a way to place payment links more prominently.
> > That's the background on it, and why there's not a whole lot of
> > 'prior art' research available beyond the "people know how to make
> > a link".
> 
> The important thing is that you guys are trying to solve a real-life
> problem.
> 
> >> I know you guys have already moved as far has having a basic
> >> specification, but it seems you may have skipped some necessary
> >> research steps (see my above comments). Perhaps you'd like to
> >> start a page at one of http://microformats.org/wiki/relpayment-
> >> research (or pick a more general name than relpayment)?
> >
> > I'll do that then. We've been using the draft writing as a way of
> > fleshing out what we wanted to create (see my comment above :p).
> 
> There's nothing wrong with writing a draft specification early as a
> strawman proposal that is likely to be changed.
> 
> -ryan
> _______________________________________________
> microformats-discuss mailing list
> microformats-discuss at microformats.org
> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
>