Google Base and Ecademy
I've been messing around this afternoon with taking entries out of Ecademy marketplace and posting them into Google Base.

I've taken the last 15 items in the marketplace and written some code to produce a custom RSS feed and saved it locally. I've then uploaded it using an ftp program. Google is currently processing the entries and accepted the file. So I think I can do a daily update of the file, save it and then use ftp_put to upload it. There's probably a way of using ftp_fput to stream it straight from the code.

Some discoveries.

1) The lack of a global location element is annoying. I've emailed Google about this but not heard anything. But then it is thanksgiving. I think they ought to accept address strings that work in google maps, break it out into street, city, county/state and country and/or provide a lat/long element. This all arises because the location element requires a full US address "Should include street, city, state, postal code, and country, in that order." and partial data is apparently not allowed. eg Anytown, CA, 12345, USA and hence SG12 7DB, UK or London, UK

2) They've added new categories Blogs and News Articles. This seems to suggest that they want pretty much any arbitrary data. That includes all the blogs, meetings etc from Ecademy. Lots of overlap here with Blogsearch and Search.

3) There's a missing category for "Listing". They've got "Wanted Ads" and a bunch of others but no obvious way to say "it's a listing and I don't know what type". I can imagine that as other people do this we're all going to end up using their categories to describe our stuff in our systems. I feel vaguely uncomfortable about this.

[ << The 'Phinest' source to the golden section ] [ Google Base II >> ]
[ 25-Nov-05 4:24pm ] [ , ]