[uf-discuss] Trying to learn microformats

[Martin McEvoy]

  Hello Tim,

On 17/08/2010 08:52, Tim's Trees wrote:
> Martin,
>
> Thank you for your detailed reply.
>
> I had hoped my site would be a comprehensive list of events within a
> certain category.
>
> Let us say Craft Fairs and because of the searching I would provide, a
> user could select all Craft Fairs in the Cornwall area for the next 12
> months.
> If each event was an hCalendar, then they could right click to add all
> to a Google Calendar and publish that Google Calendar.  If I had hoped
> to generate some sort of advertising revenue from my original site,
> then this would potentially dilute that income stream.

Not necessarily, If your site was just publishing events, then that is 
no bad thing you can always provide advertising along side the event 
data, the hope is that you will attract *more* visitors because you have 
published your data in a "take away" format i.e. hCalendar.

> They could similarly data-scrape the page and reformat and publish,
> but that would be more difficult.

Indeed ....

> So my fear was/is, am I making it too easy to acquire my lists or
> should I take it as a compliment and not worry.

Making your events/lists easy to acquire is a good thing on the whole, 
by doing so you are not only making it easy for the average person to do 
something with your data, you are also making it easy for search engines 
to store your data and include in their listings. Other sites may also 
want to do something with your data, but again don't worry too much 
about that, unless they are copying your entire website of course ;) Its 
the nature off the web these days to syndicate/re-publish data somewhere 
else.

> I was also looking at doing something similar with hListing for a
> classifieds' site.

Good Idea :)

> Many thanks again for your excellent reply.
>

No problem.


Martin McEvoy

> Tim
>
> On 16 August 2010 23:12, Martin McEvoy<martin at weborganics.co.uk>  wrote:
>>   On 16/08/2010 19:24, Tim's Trees wrote:
>>> Thank you all for your full and quick replies.
>> You are welcome ....
>>
>>> You were right, the
>>> original was a complete mismatch of quotes and once I had fixed those
>>> it displayed in Chrome and Operator:Firefox. I apologise for not
>>> spotting that.
>> :)
>>
>>> I have noted the urls you have recommended and will investigate those
>>> first in future.
>>>
>>> I am wanting to create an event site and I had the idea, I should have
>>> my entries in hCalendar format, but I am now worrying, that it may be
>>> too easy to clone my site, with a right click. Do you have any
>>> opinions on this ?
>> Im a little unsure of what you mean if you mean by cloning perhaps you mean
>> spoofing? ( copying a website possibly for fraud such as phishing or
>> email-spoofing ) it doesn't really happen *too* much in the real world
>> unless your site is a bank or it offers online payments in some way (e.g.
>> PayPal),  In which case I wouldn't worry to much about that. Having said all
>> that Social Networking sites (Facebook/MySpace) are becoming targets for
>> these kind of attacks nowadays.
>>
>> If you are worried about people copy and pasting from your website, unless
>> its copyrighted material, again don't worry too much, Id take that as a
>> compliment, the majority of people who *do* copy and paste tend to be just
>> learning. If its for anything else the stuff they are copying will never do
>> them any good as far as search engines are concerned because *you* published
>> the data *first*. Some search engines (google) will actually remove pages
>> that contain duplicate content from their listings,  or it will bury the
>> duplicate content so deep in their listings that there is no way anyone will
>> ever see it anyway.
>>
>> The rule of thumb concerning microformats is, If you use microformats on
>> your website you can expect your data to be shared, crawled and Indexed by
>> practically anything that can consume microformats, If you don't want this
>> to happen, say because your data is private or something sensitive, then
>> don't use microformats. Dont let that last part put you off though, sharing
>> your data, particularly  events and contact details, *is* a good thing.
>>
>> Hope all that helps rest your mind a little.
>>
>> Best wishes
>>
>> --
>> Martin McEvoy
>>
>>


-- 
Martin McEvoy