[microformats-discuss] Re: Educationg Others

[Danny Ayers]

On 10/5/05, Mark Pilgrim <pilgrim at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/5/05, Danny Ayers <danny.ayers at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Nope, your example misses the long tail point entirely.
>
> Well, we could play virtual optometrist, where I try to guess what you
> mean, and you shoot them down one at a time.  Or you could try to
> explain yourself better.

Ok, the long tail idea is not just about the case of 3 people who post
a picture of their albino cat jumping over a fence while wearing a
sombrero, versus the 10,000 people doing the same. It is about those
first 3 people, plus the 4 fence-jumping fedora-wearing albino cats,
plus the 2 fence-jumping fedora-wearing black-and-white cats...the
aggregated total of all of which may be well into the millions.

Each of these individual groups represents an edge case. You certainly
wouldn't want to create a format for each. But by the same token, a
format that dumbs down to the lowest common denominator (say, "cats")
is throwing much of the interesting information away from each of
those cases.

The way I think this may relate to the microformat development
process, is that by automatically rejecting edge cases on the basis
that they *are* edge cases, you may lose much of the potential value.

Cheers,
Danny.

--

http://dannyayers.com