[uf-discuss] Marking Up Personal Profiles

[Lachlan Hunt]

Tantek Çelik wrote:
> On 10/1/06 5:34 PM, "Lachlan Hunt" <lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:
>> http://lavalife.com.au/
>> http://www.rsvp.com.au/
>> http://match.com.au/
>> http://adultmatchmaker.com.au/
> 
> It would be a good start to at least add those URLs as sources for profile
> information to the profile-examples page.

Added those, as well as the non-english ones Karl sent.

>> (Unfortunately, on some of those sites, you need to become a member
>> before you can see any profiles.)
> 
> The more closed the system, the less the likelihood that they will bother to
> adopt a microformat, thus the less useful such a system is as a "real world"
> example to use for modeling.

Yeah, that's one of the problems I mentioned with those kind of sites in 
my initial e-mail to this thread.

> I recommend finding some sites where you don't have to become a member
> before seeing any profiles.

Of those sites, LavaLife and RSVP will allow you to see profile details 
without registration.  Match.com will only show you a nickname and 
photo, AdultMatchMaker requires registration to see anything.  That's 
why I said my research was primarily based on LavaLife and RSVP.

>>> In addition, I do suggest more research.
>>>
>>> E.g. you mentioned supposed rel-tag limitations, giving the example of
>>> "brown":
>>>
>>>> The recurring problem with the use of rel-tag in most of these is that
>>>> we're trying to represent name:value pairs, whereas rel-tag only really
>>>> represents the value.
>>>>
>>>> e.g. <a href="/tags/blue" rel="tag">Brown</a>
>>>>
>>>> That doesn't indicate whether it represents hair colour, eye colour,
>>>> favourite colour or something else entirely.
>>> The participants of at least one "social networking" site (consumating.com)
>>> have already solved this problem, WITHOUT name/value pairs with tags like:
>>>
>>> brown_hair
>>> blue_eyes
>> I thought of that, but one of the problems is that some sites may tag
>> them like that, others may use "brown_(Hair_Colour)", "Brunette",
>> "cheveux bruns" (French for brown hair, according to babelfish) or some
>> other variation.
> 
> You are talking theoretically "some sites *may* tag them like that..."

Actually, it has happened.

http://consumating.com/tags/brownhair (1069 people - 43.3%)
http://consumating.com/tags/brunette (1292 people - 52.4%)
http://consumating.com/tags/brown_hair (56 people - 2.3%)
http://consumating.com/tags/darkbrownhair (21 people - 0.8%)
http://consumating.com/tags/lightbrownhair (21 people - 0.8%)
http://consumating.com/tags/hairbrown (6 people - 0.2%)

So, it seems to be fairly close between "brownhair" and "brunette".  The 
other tags are relatively minor.  However, the sample size isn't very large.

> It is irrelevant what some sites "may" do.  What is relevant is what sites 
> *actually* do.  Do you have any other examples?

RSVP, AdultMatchMaker and Match.com don't do tagging like that, they 
offer a list of common hair colours instead (similarly for many other 
fields).  Although, the lists used by all 3 are very similar to each other.

Although "brunette" seems to be winning on consumating.com, those other 
3 sites all unanimously use "dark brown" and "light brown".

> Even before personals search engines, there were printed personals, and
> "tagging" conventions evolved there for people to quickly/accurately
> describe attributes and wants.  You don't need to presolve most of these
> problems with a-priori taxonomies/ontologies - the authors of the data often
> solve them themselves.

Good point.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/