Your argument of a net-positive effect is compelling but, it makes sense to me to deal with the issues as they present themselves, perception being one of them. After all, the greater the net-positive, the more compelling microformats are to use. I feel we are not addressing the issues raised by hcard, specifically. Just saying they have a net-positive effect does not warm my heart. The atom bomb had a net-positive effect, too and now we're talking global disarmament.
Cheers, -mephtu On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 5:58 PM, Tantek Celik <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Such companies are already going to far greater extents to scrape anything > resembling contact information (without really caring about false positives > etc since as your quotes point out quantity is their game) from text, HTML > etc on the web using text entity recognizers etc. > > As long as you only markup already public information with hCard (or any > other microformat), the effect is negligible on such companies, while it > enables and benefits users and developers of user-centric apps, thus > providing a net positive effect. > > Tantek > > -----Original Message----- > From: "Samuel Richter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:48:38 > To: Microformats Discuss<[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [uf-discuss] hCard slowing adoption of microformats? > > > How's this...? > > Using gmail, I happened to spy a list of supported links, here's one of them: > > Custom Web Scraping > Data Extraction & Mining Service > Buy up to 20,000 Records for $75.00 > RightHandMarketingManagement.com > > This reinforces the seriousness of the issue in my mind. If hCards > are used as indiscriminately as the data in these websites, it would > just pipeline the same information to companies of this ilk. > > -Sam > > On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:45 AM, David Janes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 9:13 AM, Samuel Richter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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? >> >> You weren't going to fill us in on the URLs, were you? >> >> >> >> -- >> David Janes >> Mercenary Programmer >> http://code.davidjanes.com >> _______________________________________________ >> microformats-discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss >> > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > > _______________________________________________ > microformats-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss > _______________________________________________ microformats-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
