Comments on: Dave Weighs in on Scoble/Facebook http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2008/dave-weighs-in-on-scoblefacebook Keeping an eye on Dave Winer Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:02:25 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: McD http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2008/dave-weighs-in-on-scoblefacebook/comment-page-1#comment-897 McD Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:34:58 +0000 http://eyeonwiner.org/archives/2008/dave-weighs-in-on-scoblefacebook#comment-897 <p>This reminds me of my experience with one of Dave's other "products":</p> <p>http://share.opml.org</p> <p>The only way to get OPML out of the site was to scrape the HTML off one of the pages and convert the links to OPML. You could "share" your OPML but never get it back (in OPML). "One-way" version of sharing. Donate is more accurate:</p> <p>http://donate.opml.org</p> <p>The "product" did not catch on... people didn't see the benefit.</p> <p>People scrape HTML pages when they must (and when they have the skills to do so).</p> <p>Services hate automated retrieval for several reasons:</p> <p>1.) they can kill performance by over taxing servers. 2.) they often get a lot of data and allow the data to be re-purposed.</p> <p>Google effectively caches all the web pages it can read and re-purposes the data to be an authoritative index. But the potential for "privacy" infringement is always mentioned as a justification for not allowing automated scraping. And justifiably so.</p> This reminds me of my experience with one of Dave’s other “products”:

http://share.opml.org

The only way to get OPML out of the site was to scrape the HTML off one of the pages and convert the links to OPML. You could “share” your OPML but never get it back (in OPML). “One-way” version of sharing. Donate is more accurate:

http://donate.opml.org

The “product” did not catch on… people didn’t see the benefit.

People scrape HTML pages when they must (and when they have the skills to do so).

Services hate automated retrieval for several reasons:

1.) they can kill performance by over taxing servers. 2.) they often get a lot of data and allow the data to be re-purposed.

Google effectively caches all the web pages it can read and re-purposes the data to be an authoritative index. But the potential for “privacy” infringement is always mentioned as a justification for not allowing automated scraping. And justifiably so.

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