Timothy Appnel: More FFKAR, RDF, and FOAF.
Peter Lindberg’s FOAF. (See also: Peter’s thoughts on a Smart RSS Reader.)
Merlin Mann’s FOAF. Merlin calls it a FOAF Bandwagon, which probably overstates the case somewhat. ;-) As for the possibilities of what we could build if we all had FOAF files: Imagine international, real-time popularity contests. It’d be like middle school with 4 billion people.
We already have that; it’s called Google.
Hmm, on second thought, maybe it is a bandwagon. We already have the inevitable backlash. Spammers might not even give two cents about what your interests are, but they will care about a vast free network of email-addresses and URLs. Even if the email-address is encoded (it is), it’s only a slight disturbance to the Darth Vaders of marketing if you share what URL to scan for email-addresses.
Um, no. Spammers are not discriminating enough to care about webs of trust
, and they already have lots of non-Semantic-Web ways of finding email addresses. And more sophisticated direct marketers are much too sophisticated to trust self-reported data.
Over at Ben Hammersley’s pad, we’re discussing how to link FOAF and RSS in both directions (pointing to your RSS feed from your FOAF file, and pointing to your FOAF file from your RSS feed), plus how to link FOAF and HTML (ala RSS autodiscovery). A couple of ideas in all directions, although for linking from RSS to FOAF, I would prefer a simple syntax that is valid RDF but would also work in an RSS 2.0 feed. Then I want a FOAF-aware RSS aggregator that gives me a right-click about the author
option that shows me their FOAF data and all the people they know — and then offers to subscribe to their RSS feeds. I get all intertwingly just thinking about it.
Meanwhile, over at Phil Ringnalda’s pad, we’re discussing how to list your enemies in a FOAF file, using Eric Vitiello’s FOAF relationship module. The syntax seems simple enough (replace foaf:knows with rel:enemyOf), but it raises interesting questions about adding too much complexity for implementors, leaving it up to the developer of the consuming application to understand the semantic relationships between all of these related vocabularies. I’m pretty sure I’m still missing several pieces of this puzzle.
