[uf-discuss] Marking Up Personal Profiles

Sun Oct 1 21:32:16 PDT 2006

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 ***