[uf-discuss] Microformats collection and VoteFor

[Sven Fuchs]

Thanks for your answer, Brian!

>> 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. 

You suggested to observe the referer log. Yup, I agree that should do
what the webbug does with less hassle. (Thanks for this one!)

Any other suggestions?


> 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).

Ah, I see. This hasn't been clear to me from the wiki.

Hmm, I think in cases like this (politics/election) there might actually
be a real impact on the result when there are massively people
"voting-for" a certain candidate's website by directly linking to it.
This is IMO an interesting aspect of directly linking to the "object" of
the vote.

Unfortunately (as far as I understand the specs) there's no way to
provide any additionally context or information about the voting (the
election) itself when I link directly from my (say) own blog to the 
homepage of my favorite candidate. There's no way to say: "I vote for 
this candidate in this election in this year in this land ..." - as long 
as this isn't clear from the candidates website of course.


> 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. 

I've actually never thought of the log files ... don't ask me why :)
Seems pretty obvious, yes.

The "webbug" has a similar downside, it must be displayed at least once.


> 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.

Yup. That's a very interesting suggestion. I'm planning to allow for
different types of "votings" anyway.


> --- 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.

Ok, thanks for the specification about the homepage. Yes, of course
these would only make sense on pages that uniquely serve as voteoptions.


> --- (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.

Hmmm, to me this sounds as if it would pretty save to completely ignore
the fact that there's ever been a different spec. :)


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

Yes, thanks again! :)

--
Sven