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Hi Steven:

Yes: http://ebusiness-unibw.org/pipermail/goodrelations/2010-December/000292.html

Note: All post to this mailing lists are archived as per the list  
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http://ebusiness-unibw.org/pipermail/goodrelations/2010-December/000292.html

Best

Martin

PS: The original post failed and I mainly relayed the message here to  
save the effort ;-)


On 02.12.2010, at 22:42, Steven Forth wrote:

> Thanks Martin
>
> Do you also have this up on a website somewhere?
>
> Steven
>
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 3:14 PM, Martin Hepp <martin.hepp at ebusiness-unibw.org 
> > wrote:
> Dear all:
>
> I recently tried to reply to a blogpost that was critical of using  
> Google's Rich Snippet functionality. Since I think my arguments may  
> be of general relevance, I post them here, too:
>
>
> Hi XYZ,
> I think you are overly pessimistic about the potential of exposing  
> structured data regarding your products or services. Clearly, while  
> informing potential customers you are also making it easier for your  
> competitors to analyze you. However, please keep in mind the  
> following aspects:
>
> 1. Not being visible with all the details of your offer is always  
> worse than being visible for both your potential customers and your  
> competitors; nowadays, you can never survive by shying away from the  
> public but just by having a different value proposition than your  
> competition.
>
> 2. Structured data, e.g. GoodRelations in RDFa, helps keeping your  
> value proposition intact when publishing it on the WWW. Instead of  
> being reduced to just the price tag, the many ways in which you are  
> different from your competitors remain accessible for search engines  
> and novel recommender systems - e.g. stock availability, warranty,  
> payment and delivery methods, or product features.
>
> 3. It is fairly easy for your competitors to analyze you even if you  
> do not publish your offer data in RDFa. They can simply hire staff  
> in low-labor countries or go via Amazon's Mechanical Turk service  
> that will collect and consolidate what's on your Web page anyway.  
> But your prospective customers cannot go that route, so you are  
> putting much more friction on the matchmaking with potential clients  
> than protecting yourself against your competition. So it is really  
> about helping search engines to help prospective customers to find  
> you.
>
> Best wishes
>
> Martin Hepp
>
>
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>
>
> -- 
> Steven Forth
> steven.forth at gmail.com
> @StevenForth
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