[uf-discuss] Microformats collection and VoteFor

[Brian Suda]

I really like this idea! I can't read much german, so i haven't read
through alot of the folksr.de site, but i have read the blog posts.

Your email is a long one, so i'll try and answer a few points, point
you to a few resources, and hopefully spark a few new ideas.

> I do know of the following approaches/practices regarding the collection
> of microformats:
>
> 1) spiders (requires actively searching the web, expensive)
> 2) track/pingback (requires usage of specially crafted publishing tools)
> 3) a form to manually enter the URL (requires additional user action)

--- i don't think these are the only options. The Vote-Links spec is
pretty sparce[1], but the FAQs[2] offer some additional information.
The link that is what you are casting your vote for can be the item or
represent the item. Back in 2003-2004 Technorati, as it
indexed/spidered normally, collected links for the candidates that
were running for US President. I don't know exactly what URIs they
were keying off of, but i would guess that it was the official
candidates websites and possibly their parties websites as well? (some
one may correct me if i am wrong).

Since people are simply voting for the one they want by linking to
your site with the last portion of the resource in the URL being the
country name. You could just use your referrer log to find inbound
links and then spider just those. The downside is that peole without
traffic would not get their vote in, so the blogger themself would
have to click the link to "activate" the vote. It is sort if the same
effect as your 'webbug' idea without the hassel.

My guess is that this would be the easiest of all the options you
presented. The difficult part is starting the meme to link to you.
Although it could be interesting to leave the voting on going... (e.g.
Mac v Windows, Christmas stockings or christmas shoes for St. Nick,
etc.) Then instead of just having a simple pie graph, you could have a
line graph over time and see how things change.

> The other question:
>
> As far as I understand from the RelFaq [5] page in the wiki (section "Is/Was VoteLinks a proper use of rel?") it would be right to markup the backlinks published in my application (e.g. on [], links on the right
> side, pointing back to the pages where a vote was found) as rel="vote-for". Is this correct?

--- by definition, yes. It is saying that "The resource at the end of
this URL is a vote-for this resource", but it would only make sense if
your outbouned Rel links were on a unique page.. It would not be true
to say <a href="http://example.com" rel="vote-for">...</a> on the
folksr.de homepage because they were not voting for folksr.de, but for
a specific question page.

> Also, the wiki states that using 'rel' for VoteLinks (as specified in some previous draft) has been depracated. So, is there any known real-world usage of this deprecated behaviour?

--- (i think) this goes back to 2003-2004 when the US presidential
elections were taking place. At first people were told to use REL,
then it was realized that REV was the proper semantics, so for a time
both were accepted. Now you should use REV, that is the correct
semantics.

I hope this helps and i haven't created more questions than answers.

-brian

[1] - http://microformats.org/wiki/vote-links
[2] - http://microformats.org/wiki/votelinks-faq

-- 
brian suda
http://suda.co.uk