[uf-discuss] Marking Up Personal Profiles

[Karl Dubost]

Le 2 oct. 06 à 12:10, Tantek Çelik a écrit :
>> 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.

Just to guarantee that what is *actually used* on the Web is not only  
English.

http://fr.meetic.yahoo.net/ - French
http://partner.yahoo.co.jp/ - Japanese
http://cn.personals.yahoo.com/ - Chinese

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

Go explore sites in other languages than English, then gather the  
results, and you might understand what sites are *actually* and  
*practically* doing.

>> I guess that's an issue with tagging in general, where
>> you get people coming up with dozens of different tags to represent
>> exactly the same concept.
>
> Actually it's not.  With folksonomies, it has been demonstrated  
> over and
> over again, that communities tend to converge on tags to mean  
> things.  Sure
> there are some redundancies but the community typically ends up  
> organically
> picking a winner and using it.  This has been seen on the centralized
> communities of delcious, Flickr, and even with decentralized blog  
> post tags
> that Technorati indexes.

Flickr is a site with an English UI, removing/selecting a big part of  
people. Something that native English speakers have always hard time  
to understand. From a practical experience, many people around me  
can't use Flickr because it is in English. Then in an English- 
speaking dominated community, yes your tags will be in English.

Flickr is extremely annoying for tags in a non english context.
Practical example:
	http://flickr.com/photos/smallbox/246843470/

These are practical problems…
	http://flickr.com/photos/tags/normandy/
	http://flickr.com/photos/tags/normandie/
	http://flickr.com/photos/tags/ノルマンディー/


Look at the tag cloud (right) and tell me if it's the one you can  
find on Technorati.
http://blogmarks.net/marks/tag/politique

reliability, regularity in data build trust. Trust is needed for  
people. This is a practical problem.


>> There are advantages to that type of tagging in some cases.  But say,
>> for example, you were using a personals search engine looking for
>> brunettes, a search engine should theoretically list people that have
>> used either of those tags.
>
> 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.

taxonomies/ontologies are rarely made a-priori. There is here a clear  
confusion of what is an organization model and the modality of  
creating this model. You could perfectly have a taxonomy which is  
based on tagging. It is surprising to read this here.  Some  
ontologies/taxonomies are defined and microformats are using them to  
describe contents.

hcard is based on vcard which is a taxonomy.
When Flickr created geotagging by maps, it is a taxonomy as well.
When you enter a zip code in a database and you derived all the  
address information, it is from a taxonomy.

Though if you enter a US ZIP code in a Canadian form, it doesn't make  
sense, because there are differences.

Anyway, it was just a mail to say that there are practical  
differences and that we have a tendency to ignore by the nature of  
the working language (English). We remove participation from people  
of other languages which could bring the diversity that *really*  
exists on the web. We ignore source of information which would help  
us to give a  real and practical solution.

If there is really a practical problem to solve which is not obvious  
sometimes.

> <meta name> is pretty much dead.

Another false assertion :) Try spotlight and you will see.

Fight ideas, not people. Respect the diversity of people (not just  
English speakers)

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
   QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
      *** Be Strict To Be Cool ***