[uf-discuss] 2 billion hCards! gathering material for a "microformats.org turns 5" blog post

[Ed Summers]

On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 10:18 PM, Tantek Çelik <tantek at cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> Some additional recent news:
> * microformats has 94% marketshare compared to alternatives (e.g.
> RDFa) according to Google (announced at the Semantic Technology
> conference)
>  - http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_web_push_rich_snippets_usage_grow.php
>  - http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/richsnippets_june10b.jpg

Was it clear if Google's stats were comparing all microformat usage
with usage of only their particular rich snippet vocabulary [1]? I'd
be surprised if it was *all* RDFa vocabulary use, since that would
mean that Google are indexing all RDFa on the web. John Breslin asked
a similar question in the comments on that RWW post [2].

If it isn't clear, I'd probably refrain from citing the 94% market
share statistic in the microformats-turns-5 post. Although I guess
this sort of posturing is to be expected, and most people take it as a
given that "there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and
statistics.", especially in religious debates [3]

The 2 Billion statistic is astounding, considering there are an
estimated 1.8 Billion people online [3]. It makes me appreciate how
important efforts are to give people the ability identify, link, and
unlink their online identities [4].

//Ed

[1] http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/rdf.xml
[2] http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_semantic_web_push_rich_snippets_usage_grow.php#comment-219873
[3] There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
[4] http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/