On 9/6/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Robert Current</b> <<a href="mailto:robert.current@gmail.com">robert.current@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
> I fail to see any<br>> benefit in sharing data between users since the<br>> likelyhood of any two users sharing the same dataset is small.<br><br>Presumably, more than two people would use it.<br><br>And two users having the exact same lineup is totally un-nessessary.
<br><br>This was addressed with xmltvid numbers. A cable TV user might pull<br>local lineups from someone else in town that provided OTA-EIT data,<br>and pull national lineups from some guy that had an xmltv file with<br>
complete data for a satellite listing.<br><br>Yes, that's not a pretty automated system to pull from a single<br>central server. But that doesn't make it useless.</blockquote><div><br>It does, however, make it complex. You're proposing developing or asking for developers to assist in a project to coordinate all these micro-schedules across peers rather than saying "Download XMLTV grabber XYZ and run it to import data". While it could be as simple as "Download XMLTV micro-schedule grabber XYZ and run it to import data from a multitude of sources", it seems an incredible undertaking in contrast with the tried and true "download it all myself from the source" methods.
<br><br>And as far has your examples, the cable TV and OTA-EIT information are not likely a full overlap. If nothing else, OTA-EIT is more likely a subset of the full cable TV lineup leaving the cable TV guy still with missing pieces. I wonder what the likelyhood is with this micro-method of any one person actually getting a full lineup for their area from any number of peers considering the likely pool of users. On the other hand, development of a full grabber (scraping or no) gives everyone the same data (complete or not) since there is no discrepancy between what I was able to get vs what you were able to get other than based on the data coming from the source. And if the source is incomplete, then it probably isn't worth grabbing in the first place...
<br></div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> The complexities surrounding the<br>> distribution methods seem to outweigh
<br>> any perceived benefit. A majority of<br>> users will be well served simply getting<br>> their data directly from the<br>> original source, not trying to gather<br>> it from peers.<br><br>For you, that might be true. So, there's no reason for you to consider this.
<br><br>But not everyone on the planet has a single, complete, original source<br>that is providing them data freely.</blockquote><div><br>True, but then also, it is highly unlikely that Person A, B, and C will each find a 1/3 portion of a complete schedule for each of them and then somehow coordinate to share those pieces with each other. It would see far more likely that Person D (Developer) wrote a grabber that collected the total schedule and Persons A, B, and C and anyone else just ran it to download their entire schedule. What if Person C moves and no longer provides that critical piece of data to A and B because they don't need it anymore? If B was getting it direct, I don't see the situations were A and B couldn't also get it themselves...
</div></div><br>Kevin<br>