A VC - Latest Comments in AB Meta

Re: AB Meta

Pete — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:48:21 -0000

Alex,

I don't know about microfromats they are not a de jure standard, just an easy way of embedding info into html.

But RDFa is a standard. It utilises xmlns just like rdf. There is bound to be a xmlns that deals with books out there(I don't know what it is and am not going to spend the time to find out though). And if there isn't you can create one, thats the beauty of rdf.

The important thing is to follow the rdf subject -> predicate -> object format. This can be embedded in html using xhtml+rdfa which is now a w3c standard.

Pete

http://localhero.biz/

Re: AB Meta

Jason Crawford — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:15:06 -0000

Interesting... I read AVC in Google Reader, and the smartlinks don't show up, so I never noticed them. And when I went directly to avc.blogs.com, it took a long time for the smartlink icon next to "April" to show up (I'm using FF2 on a MacBook).

Anyway, the smartlinks have clear value, but I still don't see where the immediate payoff from AB Meta is.

Re: AB Meta

fredwilson — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:58:09 -0000

The smartlinks add something useful to the link. That's the 'immediate benefit' that I get

Fred

Re: AB Meta

Leroy — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:16:03 -0000

why not just a browser based plug-in that allows users to summarize a pages content, CNN.com style with the bullets? Leave it open so people can continuously fine tune....but would save having to read entire articles....

Re: AB Meta

Jason Crawford — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:19:23 -0000

The semantic web is an exciting idea. However, I'm not yet convinced that it will ever come about, primarily because I don't yet see what will motivate people to start structuring their content by marking it up with metadata.

The AB Meta FAQ you linked to answer a lot of "what" and "how", but doesn't address the "why". Why would anyone spend the time and effort required to do this markup? Or rather, what will motivate enough people to do it that the semantic web has a chance of coming about?

I think if the semantic web is going to happen, it's going to require some immediate payoff from doing the markup.

Why do you do it, Fred? (Other than interest in a portfolio company and the desire to play with a new technology.)

Re: AB Meta

Alex Iskold — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:54:35 -0000

Hey Ewan,

As it turns out not a lot of people incentivised by these because you can't make a lot of money unless your blog is highly trafficed or unless you are on many blogs, like we are.

In terms of handling stuff via PayPal - that would be hard for us to do because then we need a lot of tracking infrastructure like LinkShare, etc. We are just a connector or a pipe right now.

Re: AB Meta

Alex Iskold — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 22:28:00 -0000

Hi Ewan, we already support a whole bunch of affiliate programs.

Re: AB Meta

vincentvw — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:30:12 -0000

Cool, I hope people build plugins (or whatever they're called) for sites like Wikipedia, which I often use to link to media.

Re: AB Meta

Alex Iskold — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:04:13 -0000

How do you declare that a page contains a book using these two standard formats? Can you show us an example?

Re: AB Meta

Pete — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:47:16 -0000

Please, please do not use AB Meta. This appears to be yet another proprietary fork.

Please get behind the W3C standard RDFa:

http://rdfa.info/

And if you cant do that use Microformats:

http://microformats.org/

I have already implemented both in the front end and am restructuring the backend to utilise their enormous potentai (look up sparql on google) on my website:

http://localhero.biz/

These formats have enormous potential, are open, and are standards. The same cannot be said for AB meta.

Re: AB Meta

Kelly — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:07:37 -0000

I get a tremendous amount of useful/helpful info from your blog, not the least of which is the head's up on the new Sun Kil Moon album!! Thanks! I love those guys. Did you notice they were the band in Shopgirl?

Re: AB Meta

fredwilson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:50:03 -0000

I think its something social. Nobody has built it yet to my knowledge

Re: AB Meta

daryn — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:36:23 -0000

At Startup School on Saturday, someone asked Peter Norvig (An AI/CS legend and Director of Research at Google) a question relating to the semantic web. Peter's immediate, tongue in cheek response was:

"The semantic web is the future of the web... and it always will be".

It certainly made me chuckle, but I think it has a fair amount of truth to it. Structured formats and microformats will certainly enhance the ability to easily be machine-searched, but 1. we're a long way from seeing widespread adoption and 2. there will always need to be another layer of analysis beyond that (in the search context at least) to factor in spam/abuse and other relevancy weights and factors (pagerank).

Re: AB Meta

Philippe Bradley — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:44:49 -0000

I weighed in on the top-down vs. bottom-up issue last month in what was my most viewed post to date (http://www.overthecountercu...

The argument, summed up, goes as follows: Google potentially spends up to 35,000 man hours A DAY improving its search engine's crawling of the web. It already has (limited) 'top down' (I use that term loosely in its current keyword/keyphrase-based implementation by google) 'understanding' of what is on this page; more advanced top-down semantics is the obvious next step for google, understanding the relationships between the words on this page and mine. That's a huge challenge, but Google, with its awesome workforce and historical expertise, is best placed to do it, compared to everyone else in IT/search. For them, that's probably a brilliant barrier to entry and a great way for it to cement its dominance.

But a bottom-up approach puts the hard work in the hands of the page owner (and whatever software he wishes to use to microformat his own data). Anyone can then (relatively) easily pull out and mix+match that data. So in a bottom-up web, Google has no advantage over the next johnny-come-lately; for example Cuill ( http://www.crunchbase.com/c..., if it can already index webpages better than Google, could also relatively easily read and do neat stuff with the microformats that you've been so kind as to wrap around all your information.
I could be wrong on all this, but if not, don't expect Google to be at all keen to encourage bottom-up semantics, e.g. by implementing microformats on all its content as Yahoo did (and conversely, it's obvious to see yahoo's strategic motivation in doing so)

Top-down: Google supreme
Bottom-up: Google challenged

Re: AB Meta

jackson — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:37:01 -0000

Careful now, haven't you seen Terminator? 1984? The Matrix?

I think I like the old dumb web better, it's safer.....

Re: AB Meta

Ian McAllister — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:17:07 -0000

Fred, have there been any derivative uses of the smartlinked content in your blog? Are those smartlinks clicked on more than other links?

Like you and many others I like the idea of microformats and other ways to embed metadata and structure, but am still waiting for a killer app that actually creates value from them. Do you have a position on what that killer app is, or at least what class of app? It seems like Google has to be part of the equation. I haven't heard much about Live Clipboard lately.