Exporting Webtender Data

To whom it may concern:

The webtender database is an excellent resource for all things alcoholic
and beverage related. I appreciate this great resource, and would like
to discuss with you a way in which this resource could be extended for
inclusion in other websites.

A number of services recently have experimented with exporting their
information in a variety of ways. Some have taken steps to export their
data via a specific API designed for the application: Flickr is an
example of one of these. Some have taken the effort to describe their
data in a machine readable way, using a framework called RDF - LiveJournal
is one of these. Others have taken to providing their data via
structured XML which can be reformatted with other tools.

Each of these offers the benefit of allowing users to build tools using
the data stored in webtender to create alternative applications for
viewing this data. This practice has proven to be a major benefit to a
number of information providers. When users can create their own
applications including the webtender data, they are typically more
interested in using the site in the first place, and these applications
can provide a number of ways to access data which are not provided in
the Webtender.com website. 

I would like to gauge your interest in using one of these three methods
to provide external access to the data stored in Webtender.com. If you
have interest, I would be perfectly willing to assist you, however, I
would first like to understand what concerns you might have about
providing this information to a more general, external audience than
your website. It appears as if you have a number of advertising
providers on your site, so I can understand why that might be a concern
with providing more data off site. Have you had experience with
licensing data for external use in the past? Do you expect to in the
future? 

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter, and await
your reply.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Freelance Web Developer

Received on Saturday, 20 August 2005 22:17:04 UTC