No small businesses are publishing useful data to text files because it's not standardised, since it's not standardised there's no devices / apps / services con

No small businesses are publishing useful data to text files because it's not standardised, since it's not standardised there's no devices / apps / services consuming data in that format and so no incentive to store it in that way. Some businesses publish data using structured formats for the web (microdata, JSON-LD) but have not reached critical mass, other examples like .wellknown are for more technical use cases and are not that, errrr, well known. > If that's what most users want and they want it bad enough to warrant a whole new protocol, then my thinking would be that it would have to provide some sort of competitive advantage. Users want the data – they search Google (Knowledge Graph / Google Places) for it and scour websites for it – but there's no way for companies to provide the data directly to users, other than through websites. That's what NUM is – a way to do that. > What has prevented it spreading despite this competitive advantage and why is that factor not present when it comes to adoption of your protocol? It's the classic chicken and egg problem – no one stores data using method X because no one's looking for it using method X and no one's looking for data using method X because the data isn't there. We aim to overcome that by publishing millions of pieces of useful structured data to DNS. We announced NUM on 1st September and it's experimental, so there's a long road ahead.