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03 Mar 2004
Address Services
Many services that are based on address or contact information require a user to input this information. This is extremely tedious. You forget where you entered information and slowly it will become obsolete. It is much better to have a distributed solution. One in which you manage your information and can change it as needed and more importantly where you have to this only once. Any website or service this information can come and get it. If all is well, it will be at a standard location.
I re-discovered that Alexa is trying to implement such a solution. On their website they have a tool where you can enter contact information and a short description of your website. Then you have the option to download this information as a small text-file (info.txt). You can then download this to the root of your website and Alexa will retrieve and use it. I think that this is a good solution that need to be improved, standardised and XML-ised. It could be a great infrastructure for a wide range of services.