I really like this idea! I can't read much german, so i haven't read through alot of the folksr.de site, but i have read the blog posts.
Your email is a long one, so i'll try and answer a few points, point you to a few resources, and hopefully spark a few new ideas.
I do know of the following approaches/practices regarding the collection of microformats: 1) spiders (requires actively searching the web, expensive) 2) track/pingback (requires usage of specially crafted publishing tools) 3) a form to manually enter the URL (requires additional user action)
--- i don't think these are the only options. The Vote-Links spec is pretty sparce[1], but the FAQs[2] offer some additional information. The link that is what you are casting your vote for can be the item or represent the item. Back in 2003-2004 Technorati, as it indexed/spidered normally, collected links for the candidates that were running for US President. I don't know exactly what URIs they were keying off of, but i would guess that it was the official candidates websites and possibly their parties websites as well? (some one may correct me if i am wrong). Since people are simply voting for the one they want by linking to your site with the last portion of the resource in the URL being the country name. You could just use your referrer log to find inbound links and then spider just those. The downside is that peole without traffic would not get their vote in, so the blogger themself would have to click the link to "activate" the vote. It is sort if the same effect as your 'webbug' idea without the hassel. My guess is that this would be the easiest of all the options you presented. The difficult part is starting the meme to link to you. Although it could be interesting to leave the voting on going... (e.g. Mac v Windows, Christmas stockings or christmas shoes for St. Nick, etc.) Then instead of just having a simple pie graph, you could have a line graph over time and see how things change.
The other question: As far as I understand from the RelFaq [5] page in the wiki (section "Is/Was VoteLinks a proper use of rel?") it would be right to markup the backlinks published in my application (e.g. on [], links on the right side, pointing back to the pages where a vote was found) as rel="vote-for". Is this correct?
--- by definition, yes. It is saying that "The resource at the end of this URL is a vote-for this resource", but it would only make sense if your outbouned Rel links were on a unique page.. It would not be true to say <a href="http://example.com"; rel="vote-for">...</a> on the folksr.de homepage because they were not voting for folksr.de, but for a specific question page.
Also, the wiki states that using 'rel' for VoteLinks (as specified in some previous draft) has been depracated. So, is there any known real-world usage of this deprecated behaviour?
--- (i think) this goes back to 2003-2004 when the US presidential elections were taking place. At first people were told to use REL, then it was realized that REV was the proper semantics, so for a time both were accepted. Now you should use REV, that is the correct semantics. I hope this helps and i haven't created more questions than answers. -brian [1] - http://microformats.org/wiki/vote-links [2] - http://microformats.org/wiki/votelinks-faq -- brian suda http://suda.co.uk _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
