[uf-discuss] hCard slowing adoption of microformats?

[Samuel Richter]

I'm thinking about how a mechanism that will enforce the integrity of
the "friendship chain" on something like FOAF could be implemented.
Obviously it happens that someone whom you thought to be a friend
turns out to exploit the friend network.  It seems to pose a new spin
on the issue of trust and the internet which hasn't been considered
much and may not be limited to the domain of FOAF.  This is beyond me
at the moment but, it seems an eager university computer science
department somewhere might want to tackle it.

-Sam

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 1:59 PM, Dan Brickley <danbri at danbri.org> wrote:
> Samuel Richter 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?
>
> This is certainly a problem we have encountered with FOAF, which shares a
> lot of characteristics with microformats. For example, the FOAF feeds on
> tribe.net were taken down, 'cos users didn't like having their data
> re-aggregated and published elsewhere (such as on explode.us). In this
> scenerio the user doesn't even need spammable info in their FOAF or hCard to
> be upset, they just don't want the suprise of seeing their data appear
> elsewhere without warning.
>
> My take is that we need to create incentives that benefit users, such as the
> ability to say 'sure, re-post my stuff, but on the condition of x', for some
> plausible 'x'. Such as 'post this chunk of banner-ad html a fair % of the
> time too, perhaps.
>
> cheers,
>
> Dan
>
> --
> http://danbri.org/
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