Is search done yet? Quick, find a list of 100 bloggers. Now, quick, tell me what their email addresses are.
You can find mine pretty easily. Just go to Google or MSN or Yahoo and type:
Scoble emailAnd you’ll find it within the first few links. Why? Cause I put my email on my home page. It’s amazing how hard many bloggers make it to find their email address. I should just be able to go to your home page and search for the @ character and find your email address.
I’ll ignore the SPAM aspect of this, and get to the point.
I’ve been thinking for quite some time now (since Gnomedex 05 as a matter of fact) that why not have some sort of agreed upon XML type of file that did have all of your contact information in it.
You could define a simple DTD/schema/spec for it like there is for RSS and then people could just have something like http://your.specific.site.com/contact.xml
Aggregators could then visit that at some defined cycle of time, match it up with your current subscription list and then add an additional tab within their software called ‘My Feeds Addressbook’ or some such thing.
Seems pretty simple enough right? Well how about a draft Contact 1.0 specification?
I’ve decided to take advantage of the layout of the RSS spec and have pruned/augmented as needed.
I’ve also added my own contact file.
Granted this is just another flavor of an addressbook entry, or even like what the hCard effort is doing. Let’s see if this goes anywhere.