Re: A vocabulary discussion for Digg

At 09:27 PM 9/16/2008, Ben Adida wrote:
>Steve Williams ... is working on adding more RDFa to Digg. He's 
>exploring possible vocabularies to use for # of diggs, thumbnails, etc.

Thanks, Ben.  I hope folks on this list don't mind that I have only a 
superficial knowledge of RDFa.  I do have a deep understanding of its 
benefits.  I implemented much of Digg's RDFa cookbook-style with Ben's help.

(Also, Digg is still XHTML 1.0 Transitional, so we're operating with 
the forbearance of RDFa parsers will overlook our failure to validate.)

>He may be interested in creating a new vocab for social media, but 
>he's interested in reuse first (go Steve/Digg!)

Right.  Ben suggested we create a social media vocabulary, but I 
don't want to do that until I talk to people like you who know what's 
available in existing vocabularies.  I don't want to reinvent the wheel.

>let's focus on practical/immediate options, rather than a potpourri 
>of as many vocabs as we can come up with.

Thanks for that.  I've long wanted to add more RDFa to Digg.  It came 
to a head as I worked on SearchMonkey prototypes at Yahoo! Hack Day 
last Friday.

Yahoo! does a good job of extracting RDFa (and some Microformats) and 
caching it in their search index.  SearchMonkey lets folks like me 
use that semantic data to make a more compelling search 
result.  That's good for Yahoo!, Digg, our users, and the semantic web.

But Digg hasn't yet marked up some key data that will make our 
SearchMonkey app work really well.

Manu Sporny wrote:
>Do you have a particular section of the site that you'd want to 
>focus on first? A basic XHTML example that you're interested in marking up?

I have been focusing on the Digg "permalink" page for 
stories.  Here's the one we've been using as an example:

http://digg.com/celebrity/George_Carlin_has_died

The RDFa on Digg's permalink includes the title, abstract, the 
submitters identity (his profile URL), and some other stuff.  But 
that's not enough to build a really good SearchMonkey app.  Short 
term, I want to add:

  - The Digg count.
  - The Comment count.
  - The story thumbnail image (URL, height, width, other sizes available).
  - The user's nickname, avatar, and other details (FOAF?).

When we added RDFa in May, I didn't mark up those data primarily 
because I hadn't yet found suitable vocabularies for them.

Also, I figured RDFa apps would use the user's identity URL to find 
more RDFa on Digg's user pages.  But SearchMonkey uses only the RDFa 
from the individual page, for performance reasons, so I want to add 
more RDFa about the user to the permalink page itself.

Thanks again for your advice.

Received on Thursday, 18 September 2008 15:16:59 UTC