[uf-discuss] hlisting discussion Wednesday night

[Tantek Ç elik]

On 2/20/06 8:43 AM, "Craig Donato" <craig at oodle.com> wrote:

> If anyone is interested in discussing hListing, I wanted to propose a get
> together this Wednesday night at 6pm in San Mateo at Oodle's office.
> Apologies for the late notice.
> 
> No need to RSVP but would love a heads up if you think you're coming so I
> can buy enough pizza.   Oodle's address is 2929 Campus Drive #400, San
> Mateo, CA 94403 (we sublet from Greylock).  Directions can be found at
> http://www.greylock.com/contact/directions_ba.cfm

Thanks to Craig and Oodle for hosting an excellent multi-hour discussion
session on hListing.  We have folks from Oodle, Edgeio, Technorati,
CommerceNet, and independent developer Assaf Arkin all participated in a
heated but productive discussion.

Here are some collaboratively taken (props to SubethaEdit) rough notes:

hListing meeting notes

Attendees

Tantek Çelik - Technorati
Ryan King - Technorati
Craig - Oodle, cofounder
Matt - Edgeio
Donald - Oodle, feeds person
Vidar - Edgeio 
Scott - Oodle, cofounder
Zuzana - Oodle
Assaf Arkin - uPress plugin author
Faith - Oodle
Rohit - CommerceNet

Initially the hListing authors tried repurposing hReview, but found that
differences were enough to require a different format. The other extreme
would have been to make "everything a tag." Instead, a compromise was made.

'Item type' may be sub-optimal in hReview and hlisting. In hReview, the item
type is very coarse, but there are some restrictions depending on what the
type is.

What do currently listings providers do for item type? Taxonomies?
* craigslist - very loose
* ebay - tighter
* newspapers - simple (can't do it over the phone)


Any consideration to a unique ID for a listing? permalink.

item type:
  business -> hCard item info
  person -> hCard item info
  event -> hCalendar event item info
  other (default) - catchall
  
  product - catchall
  service - catchall
  opening ? -> hCard for organization
x housing ? - adr/geo
x place ? - adr/geo
x website ? - url
x url ? - url

(x) means perhaps we should eliminate it.

if you sell etc. something, you republish with dtexpired = current datetime.

parsers should respect <del datetime="" >...</del> markup

location should be part of item info? yes
delete separate location field
and instead, extend item info
 item info (fn || url || photo || adr || geo)

can we get away with not having the item type at all?

possible approaches:
1. use tags or other microformats to define the item. no item type. allow
hCard and hCalendar event on the item type. encourage folks to use tags for
item type/category.
  +1 Tantek
2. only list things that have microformats. (person, business, event, other)
3. start with a set of classifieds as explicit item type values
  +1 Zuzana, as long as it was open ended
  +1 Rohit, marketing value of ?
4. totally free form item type - same as just a tag?

review vs. listing
 items that are reviewed often have urls
 whereas items that are listed often do not?
 listings tend to be "inventories of one"

Vidar: edgio is more interested in "how do we interpret this?", rather than
specifying user/publisher behavior/requirements

why are listing type/action required?
  why can't those be tags?


([offer] | wanted )

transaction: sell | rent | trade | meet | announce | service


if hListing becomes well used, it will become impossible to do maintenance?


should we add an optional definition list for key/value pairs?


proposed: collapse listing type, listing action, item type into tags.

converge them to "listing type" (or listing tags)
  and make a recommended set of keywords
  +1 Craig
  +1 Rohit



Thanks,

Tantek