Some thoughts about SMBmeta Initiative

Some days back Dave Winer blogged about SMBBeta initiative. SMBmeta Initiative, which stands for small and medium-sized business metadata, is an open, distributed way for small and medium-sized businesses (with a web presence) to communicate information such as the physical location of the business and the area it serves, as well at the type of business, the working hours etc to search engines and other services. SMBmeta works using an XML file named smbmeta.xml:

The smbmeta.xml file is an XML file stored at the top level of a domain that contains machine readable information about the business the web site is connected to. It is an open, distributed way for small and medium businesses to communicate information such as the physical location of the business and the area it serves, as well at the type of business, to search engines and other services. Hopefully, it will open up innovation that will result in a wide variety of new services that will benefit the SMBs and their customers.

In my opinion, This is very much like meta tags that you place in the head section of your html file. So what's the big deal. Meta tags (for e.g. keywords meta tag) are used to make your site favourite of search engines and this lead to a widespread abuse of meta tags. As far as I know Google no longer gives importance to meta tags because of this abuse. So how will we make sure that people are not abusing this XML file by entering all kinds of keywords. Any thoughts? I had thought that it was limited to just US SMB's but apparently it's not.