Re: Schema.org

I worked for Yell.com at Yell Labs.
Yell are a sunset tech industry. They have a large investment in existing IT
structure which was built to ensure a book could be produced canonical for
the years listing.
What they are left with is a sales force (largely commission based) that
scour the country for very small business to renew or add to the directory -
often with on line presence including SEO, as inducement.
But they have been largely disintermediated by current technology and the
expectations that search and social media give rise to.
The value of a canonical listing no longer exists - what is valuable is
findability which is what search engines provide.
Yell were not in the least interested in a semantic approach.
They seem to want to possess a data silo that they can charge entry/exit to
in somehow.
But this highlights the underlying conflict in this way:-
When I create a web site for my tiny business, even where I follow the
format in schema.org, surely I own that data? But I want a search engine to
index me for free, gaining its revenue through other means.
Now the way the search engine company will gain its revenue will be by
examining my business plus searches, that is use information about my
business to enhance the profile it creates of people who make searches in
which my business appears as a result.
They may try to sell this avenue to advertising to me or to someone else, or
both.
Now the conflict is that actually that information could be very valuable to
me, but it is not freely available at all.
While I think that Yell is disintermediated and that they cannot produce the
volume of searches through their own properties to produce this valuable
secondary data, it also remains that the secondary data is an artifact of
large search or usage volumes.
Conceivably the public have an interest in this data, or some aspects of it.
It is here that I think a potential conflict exists.

Adam


On 3 June 2011 14:14, Juan Sequeda <juanfederico@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm surprised nobody has started the discussion on the gran announcement of
> Google, Yahoo and Bing on schema.org
>
> What do you all think? Is this a step forward or a step backwards?
>
> Is this "the best news I have heard in years regarding the structured Web,
> RDF, and the semantic Web" [1] or not?
>
> Looking forward to this discussion!
>
> [1] http://www.mkbergman.com/962/structured-web-gets-massive-boost/
>
> Juan Sequeda
> +1-575-SEQ-UEDA
> www.juansequeda.com
>