[uf-discuss] hCard slowing adoption of microformats?

[Samuel Richter]

Your argument of a net-positive effect is compelling but, it makes
sense to me to deal with the issues as they present themselves,
perception being one of them.  After all, the greater the
net-positive, the more compelling  microformats are to use.  I feel we
are not addressing the issues raised by hcard, specifically.  Just
saying they have a net-positive effect does not warm my heart.  The
atom bomb had a net-positive effect, too and now we're talking global
disarmament.

Cheers,

-mephtu

On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Tantek Celik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Such companies are already going to far greater extents to scrape anything resembling contact information (without really caring about false positives etc since as your quotes point out quantity is their game) from text, HTML etc on the web using text entity recognizers etc.
>
> As long as you only markup already public information with hCard (or any other microformat), the effect is negligible on such companies, while it enables and benefits users and developers of user-centric apps, thus providing a net positive effect.
>
> Tantek
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Samuel Richter" <mephtu at gmail.com>
>
> Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:48:38
> To: Microformats Discuss<microformats-discuss at microformats.org>
> Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] hCard slowing adoption of microformats?
>
>
> How's this...?
>
> Using gmail, I happened to spy a list of supported links, here's one of them:
>
> Custom Web Scraping
> Data Extraction & Mining Service
> Buy up to 20,000 Records for $75.00
> RightHandMarketingManagement.com
>
> This reinforces the seriousness of the issue in my mind.  If hCards
> are used as indiscriminately as the data in these websites, it would
> just pipeline the same information to companies of this ilk.
>
> -Sam
>
> On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:45 AM, David Janes <davidjanes at blogmatrix.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Samuel Richter <mephtu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I read some blog posts this morning on microformats and a common
>>> concern (and I feel a legitimate one) is the "scraping of hCard's from
>>> web sites for future generations of spammers."  I believe that fear,
>>> if left unaddressed, will kill the microformat effort.  Has there been
>>> any discussion of this?
>>
>> You weren't going to fill us in on the URLs, were you?
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Janes
>> Mercenary Programmer
>> http://code.davidjanes.com
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>>
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