Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
On 21 Dec 2006, at 10:10, Ciaran McNulty wrote: Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to make information easier to publish and aggregate, but people need to consider carefully what parts they want to make available about themselves and their relationships to others. In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard would be useful where organisations are publishing contact information, but far from wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all their efforts into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam! With this issue, it makes no difference whether you publish microformats or not. Phone numbers and email addresses (even postal addresses) are all parsable without microformats — with sufficient effort and regular expression complexity. Spammers will go to that effort; it's their business to gleen information to abuse. I'm sure they'd be delighted to find hCards to parse and make their lives a little easier, but I don't see that it gives them any information that they wouldn't have got otherwise, through other means. As always, the only way to keep information private on the internet is not to publish it in the first place. Ben ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
On 21/12/06, Ciaran McNulty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: On 12/20/06, Angus McIntyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > There are all kinds of inferences that it's dangerous to draw from an > incomplete description. I concur, Microformats allow us to publish information, but the absence of them shouldn't be taken as conveying information. > Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which is a practical > one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the world to know > all that stuff about us? Yes, quite. Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to make information easier to publish and aggregate, but people need to consider carefully what parts they want to make available about themselves and their relationships to others. Just to briefly step back to another "principle" - using microformats does not mean you should be publishing things you would not normally. For example, if you wouldn't normally publish your phone number - don't start now just because you want to use the tel part of hCard. Same goes for XFN. If you don't already say "I'm this person's wife/colleague.. etc" don't start doing it! A person probably shouldn't start publishing information themselves that they were not originally comfortable with broadcasting. It's personal choice, and all optional. ;) -- Frances Berriman http://fberriman.com ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
Am Donnerstag, 21. Dezember 2006 11:10 schrieb Ciaran McNulty: > In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard would be useful > where organisations are publishing contact information, but far from > wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all their efforts > into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam! Legal, but futile. Obfuscation is never a good concept to avoid bad things. Any hidden secret information is at some time revealed. You may make it harder, but you can't make it impossible for spammers to grab your email address. At least here in Germany it is enforced by law that anybody putting some page on the internet for public access has to include a socalled "impressum" which at least has to contain name, postal address, telephone number and email address. For commercial pages there are still more requirements. This is to clearly state who is responsible for whatever is publicly accessible on the internet. And it is enforced by law to not obfuscate these data beyond a point that any human user can use it. This excludes definitely publishing these information as f.ex. image, since there are human users who don't use graphical browsers. I do only know of two legal "obfuscation" methods: 1. entity-encoding and 2. reversing direction. You could clearly see that both are very weak obfuscation methods, but more is not allowed. So you simply _have_ to publish your email address, if you do have any public accessible web page. So using obfuscation makes it only slightly harder for spammers to find your email address, but much harder for legal users. On the other side hCard has nearly no impact on email harvesting for spamming, but it makes it lot easier for legal users to get that address. But sure you may decide freely about what additional information you are giving away about yourself. Personal relationships and publishing them are your personal decision, noone enforces you to anything here. The main problem here arises through "bad elements". Let's assume you have a link to a friend, clearly stating him to be a friend. This friend has another link to another friend, and so on. Then assume a friend of a friend of a friend ... of your friend is a terrorist. It would take seconds for FBI to knock on your door. On the other side it would take only few more seconds if you have a simple link to your friend without XFN markup. So in the end it is your decision: Are you paranoid? Then you should stay away from the internet. Fear the internet like hell. In the internet there is no privacy. Or do you accept giving up large parts of your privacy for the sake of communication, interaction and maybe friends? Then you have to accept getting spam and other bad things, too. It's a bad world out there. It is not easy to decide here. But either go left or right. Trying some middle way is futile. ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
On 12/20/06, Angus McIntyre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: There are all kinds of inferences that it's dangerous to draw from an incomplete description. I concur, Microformats allow us to publish information, but the absence of them shouldn't be taken as conveying information. Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which is a practical one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the world to know all that stuff about us? Yes, quite. Inherent in the Microformats movement is the desire to make information easier to publish and aggregate, but people need to consider carefully what parts they want to make available about themselves and their relationships to others. In my day job, I keep seeing places where an hCard would be useful where organisations are publishing contact information, but far from wanting to make it easily parsable they seem to put all their efforts into trying to obfuscate it to avoid getting more spam! -Ciaran McNulty ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
Am Mittwoch, 20. Dezember 2006 14:02 schrieb Angus McIntyre: > Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which is a practical > one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the world to know > all that stuff about us? I keep finding myself torn between the > desire to implement XFN just because it's such a cool idea, and the > feeling that 'No, the world does not need a traversable graph of all > my relationships'. I personally think that there is exactly one XFN attribute value, which is very useful: "me". I won't put any other on the internet. But indeed that is personally my own decision. The idea of XFN is cool, although far from beeing complete. regards Siegfried ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
At 07:41 + 20.12.2006, Ciaran McNulty wrote: On 12/20/06, Chris Messina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: You could also use the absense of certain XFN values as a stopgap... At least you know that the folks without sweatheart or spouse haven't removed themselves from the pool! Notwithstanding the claim that "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife"[1], there are folks who don't have a sweetheart or a spouse who aren't looking to hook up. "I can't understand it, Mother Superior. Since I added the XFN information to the convent's website, we've all been bombarded with email." There are all kinds of inferences that it's dangerous to draw from an incomplete description. What if one's sweetheart doesn't have a URL (insane as that sounds in this day and age)? :-) My sweetheart has several URLs, but for a variety of reasons I don't want to cite any of them with a 'sweetheart' relation (and she wouldn't want me to either). Which raises the whole question for me with XFN, which is a practical one, rather than a technical one: do we really want the world to know all that stuff about us? I keep finding myself torn between the desire to implement XFN just because it's such a cool idea, and the feeling that 'No, the world does not need a traversable graph of all my relationships'. On the future day that I'm arrested for harboring thoughts unfriendly to the Regime, do I want them to have a machine-readable list of all my friends? Or do I want some future scammer/spammer to be able to go to my friend and say "Angus gave me your address and said we should get in touch." (A message that began "Hey, ___, Angus says you have a small penis." could get me into all kinds of trouble). One day marking up your relationships with XFN might seem as naive as putting your email address on your site. To use or not to use XFN is a decision that everyone has to make for themselves. One thing that I think I might use more readily would be an XFN for non-human entities. I could imagine tagging links to sites that I've built with markers like "blog", "vanitysite", "business", "project", "client", "employer" and so forth. Again, there are potential pitfalls, but it's a little less intimate than XFN as it stands now. Angus [1] "Pride and Prejudice", Jane Austen ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
On 12/20/06, Chris Messina <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: You could also use the absense of certain XFN values as a stopgap... At least you know that the folks without sweatheart or spouse haven't removed themselves from the pool! What if one's sweetheart doesn't have a URL (insane as that sounds in this day and age)? :-) -Ciaran McNulty ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
Re: [uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
You could also use the absense of certain XFN values as a stopgap... At least you know that the folks without sweatheart or spouse haven't removed themselves from the pool! Chris On 12/19/06, Alex Payne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi all. It's my first post, and I'll just dive right in. I'm interested in using microformats to represent an individual's relationship availability and preferences. This is part of an experiment in pushing relationship-seeking to the *cough* edges of the network, if you will. I'm hardly ready to propose a format, but at a minimum I see implementors providing their gender and their gender preference. Ideal location, age ranges, and other preferences would be optional. Given that this format is intended for those seeking a relationship I'm not sure if including their present relationship status is relevant; "looking" is implicit, else they should not be publishing this data. Of course, extending an existing microformat may make more sense than establishing a new one. hCard seems the most applicable of existing microformats, as XFN is intended to represent existing relationships and not potential relationships. That said, I picture scenarios in which one would want to publish their relationship availability outside of the context of the kind of contact information hCard is meant for. Your thoughts are much appreciated. -- Alex Payne http://www.al3x.net ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss -- Chris Messina Citizen Provocateur & Open Source Ambassador-at-Large Work: http://citizenagency.com Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog Cell: 412 225-1051 Skype: factoryjoe This email is: [ ] bloggable[X] ask first [ ] private ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
[uf-discuss] A microformat for relationship availability and preference?
Hi all. It's my first post, and I'll just dive right in. I'm interested in using microformats to represent an individual's relationship availability and preferences. This is part of an experiment in pushing relationship-seeking to the *cough* edges of the network, if you will. I'm hardly ready to propose a format, but at a minimum I see implementors providing their gender and their gender preference. Ideal location, age ranges, and other preferences would be optional. Given that this format is intended for those seeking a relationship I'm not sure if including their present relationship status is relevant; "looking" is implicit, else they should not be publishing this data. Of course, extending an existing microformat may make more sense than establishing a new one. hCard seems the most applicable of existing microformats, as XFN is intended to represent existing relationships and not potential relationships. That said, I picture scenarios in which one would want to publish their relationship availability outside of the context of the kind of contact information hCard is meant for. Your thoughts are much appreciated. -- Alex Payne http://www.al3x.net ___ microformats-discuss mailing list microformats-discuss@microformats.org http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss
