
Schema.org: Mission, Project, Goal, Objective, Task - westurner
https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/1127
======
opendomain
Schema.Org is an OpenDomain!

This is the story of how I got a $20,000 T-shirt: I received a call a few
years ago from a domain broker offering to buy the domain Schema.org. I tried
to tell her that I do not sell domains, I let people use them to support Open
source or charities. They must of thought I was negotiating, because they kept
on raising the offer - all the way to $20,000! I admit - I am not rich and I
was tempted. I could have used that money to help send my kids to college, but
I wanted to do the right thing, so I told her no. She then told me it as
GOOGLE that wanted the domain - I think she was expecting me to make a demand
for $1 million or something, but she was very surprised that I gave it to them
for FREE. A few weeks later, I received a box in the mail from Google with a
very nice T-shirt. Every time I wear it, my wife calls it the "$20,000"
Tshirt.

Proof:
[http://schema.org/docs/faq.html#17](http://schema.org/docs/faq.html#17)

~~~
Avalaxy
So... Why didn't you just take the money? I'm confused. Like you said, you
could have sent your kids to college, but instead you chose to deny them that?

~~~
Scaevolus
I'm kind of stunned, too.

> software developers are as a demographic cohort terrible at negotiating -
> tptacek
> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612100](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7612100)

His wife sounds justifiably annoyed. Google isn't a charity, $20-50k means
_far_ more to you than it does to them.

------
HillRat
Can someone explain to me how this fits into Schema.org's core mission (which,
as I understand it, is basically to provide a lightweight ontological overlay
on pages to assist search engines)? This seems like an attempt to build a
formal project-management ontology for systems that will never get indexed by
Google -- an effort that might benefit more from the Basic Formal Ontology as
a starting point.

~~~
soneil
It doesn't have to be webpages. I know gmail already uses schema.org for
parsing flights, reservations, appointments etc from inbound mail. So it's not
a huge leap to assume this could be used to mail todo,milestones etc to a
contributor, and have something at the other end know what to do with it.

------
kyriakos
so basically you make your site easier readable by search engines which in
turn extract the data from your site stealing your traffic?

for example if you search for something on google, you get a preview in a box
of the main info with a link to the original article (e.g. on wikipedia, imdb
etc depending on what you search for), in most cases you no longer need to
visit the original link.

~~~
wanda
There are always two ways to look at things.

In the case of Wikipedia and similar high-traffic websites, it probably takes
a bit of the load off. It's probably a considerable saving in terms of serving
requests if a user searches for an actor they think they recognise from a
movie and see a snippet from Google served from Google's cache rather than a
full pageview from Wikipedia.

In the case of physical stores and offices, I would imagine that a check for
opening hours or telephone number shouldn't be counted as a pageview ->
conversion anyway — they already chose you i.e. converted. Maybe they're a
returning customer or somebody who liked the email marketing you sent them.

Is Google Maps stealing traffic from you by showing your business on the map?
Maybe, but they're also doing you a favour. Neither Google nor Google Maps are
likely to go anywhere anytime soon, and a considerable number of people are
only going to check Google Maps and won't bother checking your site for the
same information w.r.t. your business's location.

Beneficial in terms of reviews as well — displaying the aggregated score in a
rich snippet is arguably preferable to letting the user click through where
they can be persuaded against the 4 star average by an impassioned negative
review.

Google obviously wants to be the one and only gateway to the web, and they
want to keep you on Google pages as much as possible to show as many ads as
possible, but unless you're selling ads, counting pageviews/traffic is
pointless unless it's new business, and people new to you are unlikely to make
a snap judgement based on a rich snippet. If anything, it's more likely to
convince the new user to click through to your site.

[IMHO]

~~~
westurner
> In the case of physical stores and offices, I would imagine that a check for
> opening hours or telephone number shouldn't be counted as a pageview ->
> conversion anyway — they already chose you i.e. converted. Maybe they're a
> returning customer or somebody who liked the email marketing you sent them.

As well, adding structured data to the page (with RDFa, JSONLD, or Microdata)
makes it much easier for voice assistant apps to parse out the data people ask
for.

> Google [...]

Schema.org started as a collaborative effort between Bing, Google, Yahoo, and
then Yandex. Anyone with a parser can read structured data from an HTML page
with RDFa or a JSONLD document.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org)

