Re: hypermedia affordance aspects

On Mon, 2013-07-08 at 14:10 +0000, David Lee wrote:
[...]
> If you are going to hit cnn.com  with a iPhone, a android tablet, a
> full screen Chrome browser, IE7 (as a logged in user or not), even
> depending on where you are you will get different "content" .   If the
> site knew that it was a bot (and presumably people want the bots  to
> get the data - free advertising right ?) then it could (and should,
> IMHO) provide a bot-readable variant of the web page much like it is
> now providing a tailored variant for humans. 

If you serve different content to spiders and people you have to be very
careful, as it can violate your Google AdSense terms of service.

Google fetches your pages with the adsense bot, but it seems also
fetches some pages as a "regular browser" and compares, from time to
time, both as a desktop browser and as a mobile device. You can serve
different content to a mobile device but Google has recently started
requiring that it have the full page functionality where possible.

Sites that are not advert-funded can indeed do what you suggest, though,
and many already do. Of course, people also insert false metadata into
Web pages to fool search engines. There's a rather large financial
incentive. I've encountered people making ten, twenty, even thirty
thousand dollars a month from Google ads on their own Web sites, and
certainly I've met people making a living from the ads. But they are
fickle and can vanish at a moment's notice.

Google is a $40Bn company. Hollywood box office sales are estimated at
between 10 and 20 Bn. The computer game industry might be as high as 20.
So Google is bigger than those two combined.  In their last annual
report Google said 98% of their income was from Web advertising. That's
a lot of money being made from Web ads.

When Google started supporting sitemaps, sitemap usage suddenly shot
through the roof. Similarly schema.org got the boost it needed. Teaching
Google's spiders that <ingredient>honey</ingredient> is a link
to ../ingredients/honey/ is part of what I think is needed for people to
be able to use XML on the Web - right now if you use anything other than
(X)HTML with <a href="../honey" class="ingredient">honey</a> you're
doing business behind a locked door. But, of course, the two other
necessary conditions are that Google (or Bing for that matter) be able
to generate a snippet when someone does a search, understanding that
<heading>Liam's Insect Cream</heading> is a document title for
example... and to be able to include ads.

It would be nice to support multiway links, as SoftQuad Panorama did in
2004 - right-click on honey to see
Honey
. description and properties
. other recipes using honey
. reviews and where to buy honey

Liam

PS: the cream probably works really well at attracting insects...

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Monday, 8 July 2013 14:34:57 UTC