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NoseRub DevCamp am 13./14. September in Köln

Cem Basman — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:20:25 +0000

Wer generell an offenen, verteilten sozialen Netzwerken interessiert ist, ist herzlich willkommen, am 13./14. September in Köln am NoseRub DevCamp teilzunehmen.

Was ist NoseRub? Dirk Olbertz, Kopf und Architekt von NoseRub erklärt es in einer Mail so:

NoseRub zeigt, wie mit den bereits vorhandenen Standards hCard, OAuth, OpenID, RSS und XFN die soziale Netzwerke aufgebaut werden können. Der Content und die Kontaktbeziehungen einzelner geschlossener Plattformen werden aggregiert und erlauben dem Benutzer somit einen zentralen Anlaufpunkt all seiner Aktivitäten und Kontakte im Web 2.0 zu erschaffen.

Zwischen den Ideen und Konzepten von NoseRub und Microblogging gibt es einen starken Zusammenhang. Ganz deutlich wird das bei der Open Source Software Laconi.ca (aka identi.ca & Co.) und beim OpenMicroBlogging, die ja auf ähnlichen Grundsätzen und Technologien basieren, aber einen etwas anderen Schwerpunkt haben. NoseRub und Microblogging ergänzen sich gut. NoseRub kann verteilte Microblogging Server und Netzwerke mit weiteren Technologien des Web 2.0 verbinden. Es kann als Kitt ("glue") dienen aus der Perspektive der User und so reichhaltigere Welten schaffen.

Dirk hat vor, auf dem NoseRub DevCamp eine praktische Arbeitsatmosphäre zu schaffen, wo insbesondere auch ganz konkret an NoseRub gearbeitet und entwickelt wird. Hands-on für Developer. Die Stunde. wo das Produkt weitergetrieben und neue Ideen eingebracht werden können. Super!

NoseRub DevCamp ist für Macher.

[Mehr über NoseRub hier in der "Sprechblase"]

A Semantic Web Tag Cloud

tivrious — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:16:20 +0000

[caption id="attachment_34" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Semantic Web tags"][/caption]
Is there something missing?

Future of XFN

Jeremy Visser — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 05:32:44 +0000

You know XFN -- the XHTML Friends Network? The one where you add relationship info into anchor tags, like so:

<a href="http://jeremy.visser.name/" rel="friend met">Jeremy Visser</a>

It's interesting to wonder what the future of it is. The cool thing about XFN is that it has the capability to be a decentralised social network. Facebook, MySpace, and the like, are centralised social networking sites, where you have to "register" in order to "add/invite friends", "keep in touch", etc.

I must confess that I am part of Facebook. In particular, I like the Friend Wheel application, which displays a graphical layout of the connections between your friends, rather like this:

(No, you're not getting a bigger version.)

Facebook should not be necessary to do that. Though pretty much all XFN is is ^[sic] some attributes tacked on to a link (like rel="friend met"), it has the same power. A person could write a web service that downloads a web page of your choice (like your own page that has XFN-enabled links to your friends), scans the page for XFN relationships, then scans your friends' pages for relationships, and displays a friend wheel just like the above.

This is all possible without a central authority like Facebook juggling all the relationships itself. The question is, however, why isn't it done this way?

I think I know a couple of answers to this myself, but I am interested in some feedback on other peoples' opinions. Is there a magic bullet we have we can use to promote the use of XFN, and put a nail in the coffin for centralised social networking websites?

XFN ile Bilinmeyenin Büyüsü

alemturk — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:16:40 +0000

Hepimiz web sitemiz için link değişimi yapıyor,blogroollarımıza linkler ekliyoruz. Peki daha nitelikli bir link nasıl oluştururuz diye düşünürken,XFN sistemini keşfettim. XFN sistemi ile,link verilen site ile olan ilişkinizi tanımlayabiliyorsunuz.Türkiyede duyulmamış ve bilinmeyen bu tekniği ( Sadece Profesyonel SEO Hizmeti verdiğim müşterilerime uyguladığım ) tüm Türk Webmaster alemine açıklıyorum.

XFN’in amacı,link verilen sitenin sahibi ile link veren sitenin sahibinin arasındaki ilişkiyi belirlemektir.
Sizin de bildiğiniz üzere Google yeni teknolojilere oldukça meraklı ve XFN Projesinin sitesini PR8 ile ödüllendirmiş.Demek ki Google bu linkleme sisteminden haberdar ve bu linklere önem veriyor.

XFN Nasıl Kullanılır ? Ne Fayda Sağlar ?

XFN link içine yerleştirilen ek bir koddur.Dediğim üzere sitelerin birbirleri olan ilişkileri belirler.
Peki XFN ‘i linklerime nasıl yerleştiririm ?
Şöyle bir örnek verelim ;

SEO

Yukarıdaki örnekten şu iki sonucu çıkartabiliriz:

* Sitenin sahibi ile Hacıvat biribiriyle daha önce buluşup, görüşmüşler. Bunu rel için verilen “met” değerinden anlıyoruz.
* Ayrıca bu iki kişi (site sahibi ile Hacıvat) çok iyi arkadaşlar. Bunu bize rel için verilen “friend” değeri aktarıyor.

Gördüğünüz üzere normal bir linkten farklı olarak rel=”friend met” içeriyor.Yani rel= dedikten sonra gerekli olan etiketi tırnak içerisinde gireceğiz.

XFN için kullanılabilecek değerler

Kaynak: XFN 1.1 profile ; http://www.mutasyon.net/makaleoku.asp?id=807

Açıklamalar:
Simetrik (symmetric): Karşılıklı ilişkiler için kullanılır. Örneğin Ali Veli ile kardeş ise, Veli de Ali’nin kardeşidir.
Geçişli (transitive): Bazen iki bağlantıdan üçüncü bir bağlantıya ulaşılabilir. Örneğin Ali Veli ile aynı yerde çalışıyor ve Veli de Mehmet ile aynı yerde çalışıyorsa Ali ile Mehmet de mecburen aynı yerde ekmek paralarını kazanıyorlar demektir (Tabiihayat şartlarından dolayı ek işleri yok ise).

Arkadaşlık (aşağıdaki değerlerden sadece birisi kullanılabilir)

* contact (iletişim, kontak): Nasıl irtibata geçebileceğinizi bildiğiniz herhangi bir kişi. Çoğu zaman simetrik.
* acquaintance (tanidik): Selam vermekten daha öteye gitmeyen ve belki bir iki kez konuşmuşluğumuz olan tanıdık bir kişi. Çoğu zaman simetrik.
* friend (arkadaş): Arkadaşlığımız olan birisi. Yurttaş, ahbap veya iyi bir arkadaş. Çoğu zaman simetrik.

Fiziki

* met (yüz yüze): Daha önce kendisiyle yüz yüze buluştuğumuz bir kişi. Simetrik.

Mesleki (aşağıdaki değerlerden sadece birisi kullanılabilir)

* co-worker (iş arkadaşı): Beraber çalıştığımız veya bizimle aynı firmada çalışan bir kişi. Simetrik. Normalde geçişli.
* colleague (meslektaş): Bizimle aynı meslekten olan veya üniversitede aynı bölümde okuyan birisi. Simetrik. Çoğu zaman geçişli.

Coğrafi (aşağıdaki değerlerden sadece birisi kullanılabilir)

* co-resident (ayni çati altında): Beraber aynı çatı altında oturduğumuz kişi. Simetrik ve geçişli.
* neighbor (komşu): Yakın çevremizde, belki bir kaç kapı veya sokak uzaklıkta ikamet eden birisi. Simetrik. Çoğu zaman geçişli.

Aile (aşağıdaki değerlerden sadece birisi kullanılabilir)

* child (çocuk): Kendi öz çocuğumuz veya evlatlık edindiğimiz kişi. Tersi ebeveyn (parent).
* parent (ebeveyn): Çocuğun (child) tersi.
* sibling (kardeş): Bizimle aynı anne babadan olan kişi, kardeş. Simetrik. Normalde geçişli.
* spouse (eş): Evli olduğumuz kişi. Simetrik. Geçişli degil.
* kin (akraba): Bizimle (uzaktan) akraba olan bir kişi. Simetrik, normalde geçişli.

Romantik

* muse (ilham verici): Kendisinden ilham alınan kişi. Tersi yok.
* crush: Kendisine abayi yakmiş (yani aşık) oldugumuz kişi. Tersi yok.
* date: Kendisiyle çıkılan (buluşulan) kişi. Simetrik. Geçisli değildir.
* sweetheart: İçli dişli, sırdaş ve mahrem olan kişi. Bu normalde bir kere kullanılır. Simetrik. Geçişli değildir.

Kişisel

* me (ben): Kendimiz için başka bir link (URL), örneğin diğer internet adreslerimizi belirtmek için. me değeri kullanılırsa, diğer XFN değerleri kullanılamaz. Ayrica me için simetri zorunludur.

Sizler de bu tarz ilişki tanımaları ile botlara siteler arası ilişkinizi gösterebilirsiniz.

Peki bunun,SEO Açısından faydası ne olacaktır?

Örneğin ; muse etiketi ile süslenmiş bir link mantıken Google’ın gözüne batacaktır.Bu kadar boş link değişiminin içinde bu siteye muse denilmiş ( yani üstte belirtildiği üzere ilham verici ) demek ki bu site güzel olmalı ki böyle bir link almış ve farklı kombinasyonları kafanızda canlandırıp dilediğiniz gibi linklerinizi botlarla tanıştırabilirsiniz.

Sadece müşterilerime karşı kullandığım SEO Tekniklerinden birini daha sizinle paylaştım.Her ay böyle gizli köşede kalmış,etkili olabilecek SEO Tekniklerini blogum üzerinden paylaşacağım…
Hepinize bol PageRank’lı günler …

Kaynak; seoteknikleri.com

Bir Websitesi 3 Adımda Nasıl Oluşturulur ?

alemturk — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:44:00 +0000

1)SEO yapmamız için,ilk olarak optimizasyonu uygulayacağımız bir sitemiz olmalı.
Bir web sitesi edinecekseniz,bir domain veya hostinge ihtiyacınız olacaktır.
Domain: Google.Com gibi site adreslerine domain denilir.

Hosting: Esasında her web sitesi dosyalardan oluşur ve bu dosyaları devamlı yayında tutacak bir bilgisayar gerekir.Devamlı dedik,çünkü bir websitesi 7/24 açık olmalı ki ziyaretçisine her zaman ulaşabilsin.Bunun için günün her saati açık olan güçlü bilgisayarlar vardır.Bunlara adı server verilir.Bu makinelerde yayın yapmak için,aldığınız paketlere hosting denir.

2)Bir web siteniz yok mu ? Veya hosting ve domaine para vermek istemiyor musunuz ?
Hiç dert değil. Blogger.Com ‘dan ücretsiz ve türkçe bir site açabilir dilediğiniz gibi düzenleyebilirsiniz.Yeterli kaynağınız var ise Hostbul.Net ‘i araştırarak kendinize en uygun hosting paketini bulabilirsiniz.

3)Sitenizi oluşturmak ve SEO‘ya adım atmak için hemen bir blog yaratın.
Blogger kullanmayı bilmiyor musunuz ? Hiç dert değil. blogger-destek.blogspot.com adresinden nasıl blogspot kullanacağınızı öğrenebilirsiniz.

İlk Adım ve SEO

Artık sitemiz de hazır SEO yapmaya başlayabiliriz.
SEO yapmak için neler gerekiyor onlardan bahsedelim.İlk olarak ne yapacağınızı kafanızda kurun.Site içeriğinizi kafanızda oluşturun.Ve bu içeriğe yönelik özgün yazılar yazmaya gayret edin.

Kullanacağımız teknikleri belirleme vakti geldi

a)Backlink İnşaası (Link Değişimi)

Kendinize bir backlink kaynağı oluşturmalısınız.Bildiğiniz üzere PageRank mantığına göre,link verilen site güzeldir.
Bu sebeple çeşitli Webmaster Forumlarına katkıda bulunun.R10.Net Forumlarında bulunan Link Değişim Forumu çok işinize yarayacaktır.
Siteniz yeni ise her site ile değişime girin,ancak oturmuş bir site iseniz ve belli PageRank değerlerine sahip siteleriniz varsa,muhakkak seçici olun.İçerikdaş siteler ile veya PageRank’i yüksek siteler ile değişimi tercih edin.
En önemli husus ise karşılıklı link değişimi yapmayın.Google bunu algılayamayacak kadar aptal değil.Sadece ağzınıza bir parmak bal çalar,1 hafta mutlu olursunuz,sonra tadacağınız acı biberin acısı uzun bir süre dilinizi yakacaktır.
Çapraz değişim en sağlıklısıdır…
Çapraz değişimde bir site diğerine link verir,diğer site de başka bir siteye link verir.Böylece ikisi de en kaliteli backlink olan karşılıksız backlinkten faydalanır

b)Dizinlere Ekleme Yolu ile Backlink İnşaası

Sitenizi dizinlere eklemek backlink açısından çok önemlidir.Çoğu dizin karşılıksız ekler.Ve en değerli backlinkler karşılıksız backlinklerdir.
Dizin deyince akla direkt olarak DMOZ geliyor.Kısa sürede DMOZ’a başvurmalısınız.Eğer gerçekten özgün bir içeriğiniz varsa ve Dizin Yönergelerine uygun bir şekilde açıklama yazarak eklenebilirsiniz.
Nitelikli Backlink Nedir ? Nasıl Olmalıdır ?
En nitelikli backlink karşılıksız olandır.Düşünsenize,siz bile karşılıklı bir link değişimini kolayca anlayabilirsiniz.

Direk olarak karşılıklı değişimin manası şudur ;

Karşılıksız backlink almakta en önemli avantaj ÇAPRAZ Değişimdir.

Çapraz değişim şöyle olur ;

Vereceğiniz link kodlarının mikroformatlarla süslenmesi,önemli bir etkendir.
Mikroformatlarla (XFN Örneği Mevcuttur) ilgili detayları yazıları blogumdan veya R10.Net sitesindeki yayınından takip edebilirsiniz.

c)Orjinal İçerik

Şüphesiz ki Google orjinal içeriği kolayca ayırabiliyor.Geliştirdiği algoritmalar sayesinde,kolayca kopya içeriği tespit eder.Bunun cezası değişebilir.Zaten kopya içerikle doldurduğunuz bir sayfada ön sıralarda çıkma hayalinden vazgeçin.Sitenizde bildiğiniz konularda makaleler yazın.Bakın inanın bu makalelerde hiçbir çıkarım yok.İnsanlara faydalı olmak ve bilgilerimi paylaşmak için yazıyorum.Sizin de insanlığa faydalı olduğunuzu Google anladığı gün,sizi ödüllendirecek,hiç merak etmeyin…

d)MetaTag’lar ve SEO İlişkisi

Kimilerine göre MetaTaglar SEO‘nun temel kaynağı.Ancak uzun bir süredir,SEO işi ile ilgileniyorum.Kendime yönelik edindiğim tecrübelerim var,bu sebeple MetaTagların çok ciddi bir etkisini göremedim.
Faydalı gördüğüm tek MetaTag ” description ” MetaTagıdır.
Meta Tag nedir, ne işe yarar derseniz, R10.Net’teki MetaTaglar üzerine yazdığım makalemi okumanızı tavsiye ederim.

4)Sayfa içi SEO İşlemleri

Bu kısım amatör kullanıcılar için biraz fazla tasarım bilgisi gerektirebilir.
Google yeni web teknolojilerini her zaman çok sever,örneğin CSS ‘e Google aşıktır
Eski site içi düzenin ana kaynağı olan tabloları,Google bot hiç sevmez.Eski tip tasarımla kodlanmış sitelerinizi,eğer ciddi bir SEO Kampanyasına sokacak iseniz bütün tabloları kaldırıp sitenizi CSS’e göre yeniden kodlatın.

5)Flash ve Resim Tabanlı İçerik

Bildiğiniz üzere Flash hareketli bir ögedir.İnsanlar tasarımlarda görsellikten hoşlanırlar.Ancak şunu hiçbir zaman unutmayın ki bu hareketli ögeler insanlar içindir.Sitenizi Flash ögelerle zenginleştirmek tabii ki güzel ancak botun bunları okuyamayacağı ve içinde yazan hiçbirşeyi anlayamayacağı düşünülürse, Flash içerik kullanmak pek akıl kârı durmuyor.
Tamamı Flash kodlanmış bir site de kendine göre Profesyonel yöntemler ile SEO işlemine girse bile HTML gibi statik ve PHP/ASP gibi dinamik bir içeriğin önünde oldukça zayıf bir rakiptir.Bu sebeple sitelerinizi Full Flash - Full Resim vb. şekilde kodlanmaktan kaçının.
Unutmayın ki herşey görsellik değildir ve ziyaretçiniz olmadıkça istediğiniz kadar görsel siteniz olsun,müşteri potansiyelinizi arttıramazsınız.

Saatin gece 5 sularında olması sebebi ile uykum geldi.Makalemi burada bitiriyorum.Profesyonel SEO‘cular için de çok yakında bir makale yazacağım.
Dileğim şu ki,sadece backlink ve link değişiminin manasını öğrenen herkes SEO yapıyorum diye çevrede konuşmasın.SEO ciddi bir iştir.Risk potansiyeli yüksektir.Herşeyinizi kaybedebilir veya gelirlerinizi katlayabilirsiniz.
Bu sebeple bir SEO Uzmanı ile çalışacaksanız muhakkak bilgi düzeyini ölçmeniz gerekir…

Kaynak ; seoteknikleri.com

XFN™ (XHTML Friends Network)

mayleonardg — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:14:37 +0000

Pensé pasar por alto este término, pues hasta lo confundí con una etiqueta de wordpress, luego me pareció importante y resulta que es un nuevo concepto dentro de la gran cadena de la red social. XFN es una manera sencilla de respresentar relaciones humanas en los hiperenlaces o hiperlinks.

Es decir es un hyperlink + atributo 'rel' .

Lo que hace el XFN es poner un rostro humano a un link, es decir, personalizarlo, humanizarlo. Existen muchos sitios para encontrar enlaces o feeds a blogs o sitios como son Technorati o Feedster, pero ninguno hace referencia a las relaciones humanas entre la gente responsable de esos nodos. A través de un pequeño conjunto de valores que describen las relaciones personales de los propietarios de los enlaces.

Qué se tiene que hacer?

Son cuatro fáciles pasos:
1. Tener una o más páginas que se quiera enlazar amigablemente con XFN
Para ello se necesita cualquier en enlace a gente que se conozca

2. Añadir XFN a los hiperlinks personales

Editar el blogroll o páginas de enlaces para cada hyperlink personal, por ejemplo:

<a href="http://mayleonardg.example.org">...

Añadir el atributo rel con los valores apropiados separados por espacios (estos valores son los vínculos personales entre enlaces)

<a href="http://mayleonardg.example.org" rel="friend colleague partner">...

Hay una lista de significados de los valores XFN detallados rápidamente:

XFN quick reference
relationship category
XFN values
friendship (at most one): friend acquaintance contact
physical:
met
professional:
co-worker colleague
geographical (at most one):
co-resident neighbor
family (at most one):
child parent sibling spouse kin
romantic:
muse crush date sweetheart
identity:
me
Se puede tipear los valores o usar el XFN Creator para editar visualmente y crear los hiperenlaces.

3. Referenciar el perfil XFN

Hay que hacerles conocer a los navegadores y buscadores que su página soporta XFN oficialmente.

En la etiqueta HTML <head> se debe añadir el atributo profile de la siguiente manera:

<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">

4. Añadir la etiqueta

Para publicar en el sitio que usa XFN , hay que bajar la imagen y ajustarla si es necesario.

<a href="http://gmpg.org/xfn">
<img src="xfn-btn.gif" alt="XFN Friendly" />
</a>

relationship category	XFN values
friendship (at most one):	`friend` `acquaintance` `contact`
physical:	`met`
professional:	`co-worker` `colleague`
geographical (at most one):	`co-resident` `neighbor`
family (at most one):	`child` `parent` `sibling` `spouse` `kin`
romantic:	`muse` `crush` `date` `sweetheart`
identity:	`me`

y eso es todo....!!!

Más información:

http://gmpg.org/xfn/

In the wild snapshot#3: DiSo profile plugin

Bob Ngu — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:13:51 +0000

I had an excellent conversation with Stephen Paul Weber, an active DiSo plugin developer, on his experience with the DiSo profile plugin. For those of you unfamiliar with this series of posts, the idea is to create blog-length interviews with various in the wild apps describing their processes and the technologies that they use with regards to data portability. The goal is to profile real use cases, solutions, and lessons learned when it comes to the current state of affairs for data portability technology. Note that these posts aren’t meant to recommend or not recommend certain technology, I leave that up to the developers/architects to decide based on their needs. If you have such an app and are interested in being interviewed, please leave me a comment on one of my posts and I will get in touch with you.

DiSo Project Background
Straight from the DiSo Google group About page

Social networks are becoming more open, more interconnected, and more distributed. Many of us in the web creation world are embracing and promoting web standards - both client-side and server-side. Microformats, standard apis, and open-source software are key building blocks of these technologies.

DiSo (dee • zoh) is an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts. or as Chris Messina puts it:“to build a social network with its skin inside out”.

You can also listen to an interview by Chris Messina on Chris Messina about DiSo.

At this stage, DiSo plugins only work on self-hosted WordPress blogs which means if you have a blog on wordpress.com, you are out of luck. Also, all DiSo plugins currently are written in PHP, WordPress's choice of language. Visit the WordPress site to get instructions on how to host your own WordPress blog and install plugins.

Application Overview
The DiSo WordPress profile plugin has the following main features

When a user signs up for a WordPress account, the plugin makes it easier to import the user's profile information via hCard and XFN (if available)
Once a user has signed up for a WordPress account, the plugin makes it easier for the user (now blog owner) to publish their own profile with standards like hcard, XFN
Supports permission features allowing blog owner to restrict access to his information based on predefined relationship, e.g., I can't see his phone number but friends of him who login with their OpenID and are present on his authorized list of friends can see his phone number
There is a sidebar widget that displays names/avatars of most recently logged in visitors

Technology
The key technical pieces are hCard, XFN (rel-me, rel-contact), PHP5, and standard WordPress plugin architecture. The plugin should work on WordPress 2.0 and above, and has been tested on 2.3 through 2.5. Currently the plugin mimics SGAPI functionality without the FOAF bit. Also, FOAF was considered but not implemented, another item for the future perhaps. He plans to add Google Social Graph API (SGAPI) support, but it wasn't available when the plugin was written, so it is something to consider for the future - Steve Ivy wrote a PHP wrapper for SGAPI.

While the plugin works with OpenID, it does not require OpenID. There is a button to import profile and can fetch profile information if it is not an OpenID URL. OpenID profile extraction for XFN and hCard is automatic upon registeration and login. For OpenID feature to work, it needs the WP-OpenID plugin. No other libraries or plugins are required, in fact the import button works fine if the WP-OpenID is not installed. To display the user's profile, the user needs to add a WordPress template tag. There is a page token for rendering on a WordPress page and a PHP function for addition directly to the template (documented on the plugin page). So far, most people don't use it as a sidebar widget and instead display their profile information inline in the blog.

For an example of the plugin in action, check out Stephen's blog, it powers the top half of his main page and the avatars of recent visitors in his sidebar.

Lessons learned
Some people have hCard on their OpenID pages via OpenID delegation usually or directly on the page. A large number of people have rel-me links going to their main profile somewhere else. In his opinion, the biggest hurdle is still HTML parsing in PHP which is surprsing to me since PHP is such a popular web development language. Event though PHP has excellent XML support but if the HTML is broken or incomplete as it is often the case in the world wild web, there is no library to handle that. An option is to fix it with HTML Tidy but most shared service providers (like DreamHost) do not have HTML Tidy installed. Without HTML Tidy, the plugin has to run the page through W3C remote tidy proxy which can be slow. Another option is to use HTML Purifier which is a re-implementation of HTML Tidy in PHP.

The current plugin user base is primarily DiSo developers and he has not gotten any feedback from non-DiSo developers. He noted that there is a goofy WordPress thing where the permissions model is based on the contacts list but WordPress only supports one blogroll list, so everyone on that list has the same permission. This is not a problem for most blogs but it could be a problem for multi-authors blog. There is no affiliation with WordPress other than it is a WordPress plugin.

I like to FOAF you

Bob Ngu — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:08:23 +0000

No, it isn't a proposition, so get your mind out of the gutter :) FOAF stands for Friend-of-a-Friend and is a RDF taxonomy capable of describing a person and his/her friend(s) in far more glory details than XFN, in fact it is a competing standard. Reading your mind, you are probably going to ask me, what is RDF? RDF (first published specs in 1999) stands for Resource Description Framework which means absolutely nothing to most people however it is often touted as the foundation for the so-called semantic web. If you want a good introductory RDF post, check out What Is RDF. A synopsis of RDF extracted from this ReadWriteWeb post Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies

RDF is a powerful, graph-based language for declaring things, and attributes and relationships between things. In a simplistic way, one can think of RDF as the language that allows expressing truths like: Alex IS human (type expression), Alex HAS a brain (attribute expression), and Alex IS the father of Alice, Lilly, and Sofia (relationship expression). RDF is powerful, but because it is highly recursive, precise, and mathematically sound, it is also complex.

On a high level, FOAF has the following categories

Person's basic information such as name, nick, title, homepage, email, surname, first name, given name, email (expressed as mbox), etc.
Person's extended information such as blog, interest, project, school home page, work home page, friend(s) he knows, etc.
Person's online accounts (includes instant messaging)
Person's projects and groups
Person's documents and images

As you can see, it allows for extensive coverage of a person's information. If you want the full details, check out FOAF Vocabulary Specification 0.91. Assuming you have a basic knowledge of XML, let's take a simple example to illustrate how FOAF is actually written.



<rdf:RDF

      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
<foaf:Person>

      <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name>

      <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:johndoe@hisemailprovider.com" />

</foaf:Person>
</rdf:RDF>

The above XML snippet describes a person's name and email, obviously John Doe is not a real name and johndoe@hisemailprovider.com is not a real email but you get the idea. Technically this describes a person, not the "me" identity as defined by XFN rel-me.

Let's take a more slightly more complex example



<rdf:RDF

      xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"

      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/">
<foaf:Person>

      <foaf:name>John Doe</foaf:name>

      <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:johndoe@hisemailprovider.com" />

      <foaf:knows>


           <foaf:Person>

                <foaf:mbox rdf:resource="mailto:jane.smith@hercompany.com" />

                <foaf:name>Jane Smith</foaf:name>

           </foaf:Person>


      </foaf:knows>

</foaf:Person>

</rdf:RDF>

Basically the above FOAF says there is a person John Doe, his email is johndoe@hisemailprovider.com, he "knows" Jane Smith, and her email is jane.smith@hercompany.com. Note that "knows" does not necessarily equate to a friend, it simply means that you know someone, that person could be a friend, lover, co-worker, parent, sibling, or someone you met online but not in person, etc. For a more in-depth look at FOAF, check out XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF.

Ok, now that you know how to create basic FOAF, what next. Unlike XFN / hCard / microformats, FOAF is delivered via a file separate from any HTML markup. Creating a FOAF file is not something that a Joe Blow user will ever do manually. However, if you are curious and want to play around with creating FOAF, you can use this handy tool FOAF-o-Matic. For most users, their service providers, the ones that support FOAF, will handle all the intricate details behind the scene. For example, if you have an account at MyBlogLog, you can check out their FOAF feature by appending "/foaf" to the end of your MyBlogLog member URL. If you aren't a MyBlogLog member, here is Ken Brewster's MyBlogLog FOAF file, http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/kentbrew/foaf/, and check out his fun FOAF consuming app, picture below

Since FOAF is a separate file, you have to link to it from a HTML page by adding the following HTML code within your <head> tag (using Kent Brewster's FOAF URL)



<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/kentbrew/foaf/" />

In MyBlogLog's case, that HTML code is added automatically to a member's profile page. I should note that in MyBlogLog's case, the FOAF file is publicly available without any authentication allowing any search engine to crawl and index it, in fact, this information is available through Google Social Graph API but beware that there is a current limitation with Social Graph API in that Googlebot does not crawl a FOAF file linked from an HTML page, hence not making it available for the API to parse. In Brad Fitz own words,

I just verified that the problem is the crawl coverage. Historically Googlebot hasn't cared about FOAF because it hasn't used FOAF, so why hit your server fetching it just to throw it away? Now that the SGAPI is using it, though, I need to ask Googlebot to go get that FOAF that I know exists but is uncrawled.

A few parting thoughts...

Chris Messina thinks that FOAF baking in relationship information is a fundamental flaw, I have to respectfully disagree because I think it is a key missing feature from XFN/hCard, at least when it comes to my XFN consuming app. Upon further reflection, I think I understand Messina's concern about FOAF being potentially convoluted. It is due to the powerful recursive nature of RDF that can lead to circular references and if a FOAF parser doesn't account for this, it can lead to infinite loops.
Since FOAF only has a "knows" property, it is less descriptive, hence less useful, than XFN rel values (friend, acquaintance, co-worker, neighbor, sibling, parent, child, crush, date, etc)
Apparently FOAF does not have properties to specify an address, e.g.
state/province, country, city, street address, quite odd indeed. However, it can be remedied by adding VCard namespace to RDF.
The general vibe in the web development community is that FOAF is more complicated than XFN so it is more likely to see XFN in the wild than FOAF
Firefox Operator plugin does not consume FOAF information
FOAF information is meant for app-to-app consumption unlike XFN / hCard which are embedded in HTML. Check out this post Wordpress, FOAF, OpenID - updated for a WordPress plugin retrieving FOAF profiles when users authenticate a wordpress blog with OpenID.
There is a recent effort, hFOAF, to combine FOAF, hCard, and XFN

In the wild snapshot#1: Lessons from my XFN coding experiment

Bob Ngu — Sun, 18 May 2008 18:58:33 +0000

In an offline conversation with Chris Messina, we discussed the idea of creating blog-length interviews with various in the wild apps describing their processes and the technologies that they use with regards to data portability. The goal is to profile real use cases, solutions, and lessons learned when it comes to the current state of affairs for data portability technology. I am using the term "data portability technology" loosely here and is in no way affiliated with the ongoings of DataPortability.org.

So I am giving it a go and see what comes of it because we both think this kind of information can be useful to others looking to understand the lay of the data portability land. As such, I will title all such future posts starting with "In the wild snapshot..." as well as assign the category (WordPress terminology) of "in the wild snapshot". If any of you are interested in doing such an interview, leave a comment on here and I will get in touch with you. Note that these posts are generally meant for web developers but everyone is welcomed to read it of course.

First up, I interviewed myself on my recent XFN coding experiment, neat how that works.

Application Overview
Given the abundance of XFN producers available, I wanted to create a XFN consuming application instead. If you need an introduction to rel-me and XFN, check out my earlier post here. The basic idea is to extract XFN information from a URL and present it in a human readable form, in my case, grouping rel-me entries into "My Online Identities" and rel-contact entries into "My contacts", that's it, pretty simple thing to do.

Technology
Technology considered: XFN, FOAF, Javascript, JSON, DOM, server side platform (like Ruby on Rails, etc), Google Social Graph API, Google Social Graph Test Parser, lab.backnetwork ufXtract microformats parser

Technology used: XFN, Javascript, JSON, DOM, CSS, lab.backnetwork ufXtract microformats parser

To begin with, I considered client side (Javascript, JSON, DOM, CSS) vs. server side (Ruby on Rails) platforms and went with client side technologies primarily because I had a good example client side app to start with, courtesy of Kevin Marks (OpenSocial advocate and microformats founder). You will notice the very similar layout and fonts, I like to reuse code.

The next question is selecting an appropriate XFN parser. I can either try to find some Javascript library or write my own or use a 3rd party service. To make things easier, I decided to go with a 3rd party service. I have 2 choices to pick from 3rd parties, lab.backnetwork microformats parser and Google Social Graph API. I decided to use lab.backnetwork parser primarily because it parse pages in real-time whereas Google Social Graph API only parse pages crawled by Googlebot which can result in data staleness. With lab.backnetwork parser, I used the JSON callback to process the JSON data structure passed back by the parser. Once I have the JSON data, I then sliced and diced it to dynamically generate additional HTML using Javascript, DOM, and CSS.

If you want more details on how to use Javascript to call the lab.backnetwork parser, check out this excellent post Javascript badges powered by JSONP and microformats. Extracted from the post, here's the script tag code calling lab.backnetwork parser

var script = document.createElement('script');

script.type = "text/javascript";

Badge.obj = badge;

script.src = "http://lab.backnetwork.com/ufXtract/?url=" + escape(link.href) + "&format=xfn&output=json&callback=Badge.build";

head[0].appendChild(script);

Lessons learned
As a newcomer to XFN, this is a good way, at least for me, to learn about XFN. lab.backnetwork parser works pretty well for extracting XFN information especially since it provides real-time parsing. However, unlike Google Social Graph API, it doesn't currently parse FOAF. FOAF is a competing standard to XFN but can be used in conjunction with XFN. Here's a post about XFN and FOAF. From the few profile pages I have seen, it is possible for people to use both XFN and FOAF. For example, on such a profile page, XFN is used to markup the multiple rel-me identities and FOAF (in a separate file) is used to list all his friends. However in other profile pages, FOAF is skipped altogether. It doesn't appear that there is a best practice published on how to mix and match the various technology.

Another issue I ran into is parsing and displaying human readable names for XFN URLs. As it stands, XFN allows one to define relationship between oneself and friends all centered around the URLs. However, URLs are not designed for optimal human readability, some URLs are long and unruly and others employ the use of proprietary internal naming scheme, e.g. (actual site names changed to protect the innocent),

http://www.site1.com/profile.php?id=500033387
http://www.site2.com/user_details?userid=oBWvYxHrbjVHZGRu17VG2g
http://www.site3.com/photos/15738836@N00/

The reason why I think it is important to couple human readable names with URLs is that a consuming app usually wants to do something meaningful with the XFN information and URLs alone does not provide complete information resulting in the end user having to do more work filling in the human readable information after the initial extraction.

In my discussion with Kevin Marks, he indicated that hCard can and should be used along with XFN to provide complete information. For example, it is possible to have the following XFN and hCard markup

I think this is a best practice that is not obvious. Developers are generally familiar with each type of microformats standard but I haven't seen much documentation in way of how to mix and match the various standards for optimal use. Each standard tends to be describe in silo without consideration for other standards, so hopefully revelations like this can help developers better understand how to use the standards.

Even though the XFN/hCard combination is more complete than just XFN, I still see some issues with it. For example, a parser has to understand the implied relationship between the hCard information and the XFN information and returns that information as a related entity meaning that hCard provides the human readable names for the XFN URL, a relationship that is currently not part of the hCard or XFN spec, so it has to be inferred by the developer. Also, I would like this type of cross standards best practices to also extend to XFN/FOAF, etc. Note that at this time, Google Social Graph APIs do not parse hCard information so even if someone put that information on their profile page, it won't be useful if the consuming app uses Google Social Graph API. Kevin indicates that he might rectify this in the future and extends the API to also parse hCard.

One last thought, even though I started my application using Javascript, if I want to do more useful stuff, I would switch over to server side code. In particular, if I need to store persistent user information, I need a database and that's best facilitated by server side platform.

Feedback and suggestions are welcomed.

Update
Chris pointed me to a blog post he did on XFN, Portable contact lists and the case against XFN, it's worth a read IMO.

Comcast Cuddles Up to Google, Enters Social Network Fray and Acquires Plaxo

dsarna — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:42:26 +0000

Comcast Corp (CMCSA.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is showing increasing signs of cuddling up to Google. It has jumped in to the social networking fray, where Facebook and MySpace are the leading players, by acquiring pioneer Plaxo for about $175 million, "plus or minus 5%," while Microsoft last October paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook, valuing newcomer Facebook at $10 billion, and proving once again that the pioneer is the fellow with the arrows in his back. At the time, Microsoft won a high-profile technology industry battle against Google and Yahoo for the privilege of making the investment.

Comcast stated that it will use Plaxo to offer social network links across Comcast-connected devices, from TVs to digital video recorders to, eventually, wireless devices, thanks to the new partnership with Sprint (S.N: Quote, Profile, Research), Clearwire (CLWR.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Google (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) which we discussed in an earlier post. Plaxo's own take on the transaction with Comcast is discussed in its blog and the sale was driven, in part, by Plaxo's investors' desire for liquidity.

Plaxo was founded in 2001 by two Stanford engineering students, Todd Masonis and Cameron Ring, as well as Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who was pushed out in 2004 by Plaxo's financial backers, only to become the founding president of Facebook. In the last three years, Plaxo has been focusing on partnerships with big Internet companies to help synchronize address books and calendars with other Internet services rather than competing with Facebook and MySpace head-on.

I think it is significant that Plaxo announced a deal with Google to become "Social Graph Provider in Support of Google Friend Connect" just before the transaction with Comcast was announced. Plaxo has been working hard on a number of initiatives in support of its "all connected" vision including OpenID which eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, microformats, a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards, OpenSocial, which defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites, Verisign's consolidated online identity, a credentialing system for more secure online transactions, and the Social Graph API lead by Google. The Social Graph API now makes information about the public connections between people on the Web, expressed by XFN and FOAF markup and other publicly declared connections, easily available and useful for developers. Perhaps most importantly, Plaxo supports of Google’s just announced “Friend Connect initiative.” Plaxo's announcement that it will become a “Social Graph Provider” in support of "this bold initiative to “socially-enable any webpage" was obviously in the works while Plaxo and Comcast were talking turkey.

What is a Social Graph Provider? As Plaxo says, it’s any social network that elects to let its users take their “friends list” with them to use all over the open Social Web. We agree with Plaxo's assertion that "this is a critical missing piece at the center of a “services layer” for the emerging Social Web ecosystem."

It's obvious that Comcast's acquisition of Plaxo on top of its recent deal with Clearwire (in which Google also invested) indicates clearly that Comcast and Google are becoming increasingly cuddly. One also has to wonder why Google itself did not acquire Plaxo, as money is obviously no object here. I think that there is more to this story than meets the eye, and that additional announcements will be forthcoming.

A real life use case of Microformat hCard in action

Bob Ngu — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:58:20 +0000

Just yesterday, I was writing about rel=me, XFN, and microformats, check out the post A simple data portability project or is it if you haven't read it already or just want some background on rel=me, XFN, and microformats.

Today I plan to attend the monthly DataPortability meetup at LinkedIn office in Mountain View. For directions, I would normally go through a series of steps to open a new tab, load google maps, find LinkedIn, etc. However, with my new found microformat knowledge, I immediately noticed that the Firefox Operator plugin lit up when the event page is loaded. As it turns out, upcoming.yahoo.com, the event service provider in this case, supports microformats.

Here's the Operator showing the contact details for the event

To map it out, I clicked on "Find with Google Maps" and presto, it shows up on Google maps, very cool. Note that the contact information is using the hCard microformat. And hCard is actually based on another standard, vcard. hCard is just vcard expressed in HTML format. Here's the actual HTML for that information



<div class="venue location vcard">

  <span class="fn org">

<a href="/venue/59005/">LinkedIn</a>

</span>

<div class="address adr">

<span class="street-address">2029 Stierlin Court</span>

<span class="locality">Mountain View</span>

<span class="region">California</span>

<span class="postal-code">94043</span>

  </div>

...rest deleted from brevity

</div>


The hCard bits are represented in class="street-address", class="locality", class="region", etc., attributes.
Here's the Operator showing the event calendar details



If you wish to add this event to your favorite calendar like Outlook, click on "Export Event" or perhaps "Add to Yahoo calendar" or "Add to Google calendar".
Here's the Operator showing the various event tagspaces



Tagspaces is also another microformat standard but so far it hasn't been useful to me as a user. Tags are widely implemented in popular social networking sites, though in some places they are called keywords, e.g., if you add a video clip from the movie "Rush Hour 3", you can tag it with "Jackie Chan", "Martials arts", "Kungfu", "comedy", etc, you get the idea. The more tags you add, the easier it is for someone else to find it. 
However, it hasn't translated well with most of the tags I have seen so far. Take a look at the tags for the event page, it lists "dataportability", "microformats", "relme", "upcomingevent472061". For "dataportability", it then list sub options for "Find products on Amazon.com", etc. Without putting my technical hat on, I would be totally puzzled by "dataportability", "microformats", "relme", "upcomingevent472061", let alone find "dataportability" product on Amazon.com. In fact, I tried to find dataportability product on Amazon.com and guess what, it came up zippo as it should because there is no such thing. However to a first time user seeing and trying it, a likely first impression is that it is useless and broken. On other microformat capable pages, I saw duplicate (sometimes 3 or 4 times) tags making it even more confusing, this probably could have been handled by Operator removing the duplicate entries though but there shouldn't be dups in the first place. Anyway, I do think this is a useful feature but it requires more usability thoughts for Joe Blow users.



A simple data portability project or is it
Bob Ngu — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:35:37 +0000
As stated in my last post Storm in a teapot, DataPortability.org has started a DIY project of the month on rel=me. 
First off, a bit of background about rel=me (rel is short for relationship), XFN, and microformats. rel=me is merely one piece of XFN (XHTML Friends Network) microformat standard. XFN is a format to depict social relationships, i.e., friends, family, lovers, co-workers, etc. For a quick introduction to XFN, check out this page - assumes basic HTML knowledge. 
What are microformats you ask. According to microformats.org about page, microformats are designed for humans first and machines second. Well not really, especially for humans that are non-techies. It should have said that microformats are designed for humans with at least a basic knowledge of HTML otherwise it is just gibberish. HTML knowledge is primarily a domain expertise of web developers and designers which are a subset of developers. For example, I met with a friend of mine yesterday who is a software professional for over 20 years with extensive experience in Java / J2EE, security appliances, etc and he has never heard of any of the data portability technologies or even FriendFeed or Twitter for that matter. He is just as clueless as the non-techie users in terms of knowing what XFN is though he has the ability to learn about it far more quickly than a non-techie user.
XFN is only one microformat standard, other microformat standards are

hAtom - for marking up Atom feeds from within standard HTML
hCalendar - for events
hCard - for contact information; includes adr - for postal addresses, geo - for geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude)
hReview - for reviews
hResume - for resumes or CVs
rel-directory - for distributed directory creation and inclusion
rel-nofollow, an attempt to discourage 3rd party content spam (e.g. spam in blogs).
rel-tag - for decentralized tagging (Folksonomy)
xFolk - for tagged links
XOXO - for lists and outlines

Getting back to DataPortability.org DIY rel=me project. For those of you that understand HTML, rel=me is an HTML attribute you can add to href link tags to describe your various online identities. For a full list of other rel values, check out this page. For example, here are some of my online identities in XFN rel=me format

<a href="http://twitter.com/bobngu/" rel="me">Bob Ngu's Twitter profile</a>

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobngu/" rel="me">Bob Ngu's LinkedIn profile</a>

<a href="http://friendfeed.com/bngu" rel="me">Bob Ngu's FriendFeed profile</a>

<a href="http://ungeekdapo.wordpress.com" rel="me">Bob Ngu's Data Portability Blog</a>



Note that I did some HTML tricks to not display the above information as regular links, otherwise it would look like this normally

Bob Ngu's Twitter profile

Bob Ngu's LinkedIn profile

Bob Ngu's FriendFeed profile

Bob Ngu's Data Portability Blog



As you can see, the actual HTML output has no visual difference as far as a user is concerned, they are simply regular links. But to a XFN capable reader or browser, it can understand the rel=me attribute as semantically meaning "you". Note that there are many different forms of online identity, not just profiles at popular social sites but also any blogs you own, etc. This is not immediately obvious to a regular user so it's worth pointing out. 
So assuming that you went through the trouble to write up your HTML with rel=me, what next, where is that information actually consumed. I don't think the 2 most popular browsers (IE 7 and Firefox 2) at this time have native support for XFN,  I hear Firefox 3 is suppose to have native microformat support but I haven't looked for it and if it is there, it isn't immediately obvious to me. The closest thing I can find is a Firefox plugin called Operator. Operator is a microformat capable reader and for the most part seems to be able to consume most of the above microformat standards except rel=me, kind of odd but kind of understandable.
Here's an example of a microformat capable page, and this is the microformat information that the Operator (installed on Firefox 2) plugin extracted from the page. For example, there are 3 contacts information: deBurca Ltd, James Burke, Joscelyn Upendran. For all 3 contacts, you can export the contact information in vcard format, just select "Export Contact".


If you want to test out microformats, you can also use tools like lab.backnetwork.com ufXtract - Microformats Parser (Beta 0.2.2) to read a microformat capable page. I don't recommend nor expect a non-techie to use that tool though. If you are technically inclined, go ahead and plug in this post URL in the ufXtract tool and select "me" for format, click submit, and you will see the rel=me information extracted.



ufxtract
 me:

  text: Bob Ngu’s Twitter profile

  link: http://twitter.com/bobngu/
 me:

  text: Bob Ngu’s LinkedIn profile

  link: http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobngu/
 me:

  text: Bob Ngu’s FriendFeed profile

  link: http://friendfeed.com/bngu
 me:

  text: Bob Ngu’s Data Portability Blog

  link: http://ungeekdapo.wordpress.com/



Another service capable of consuming XFN, including rel=me, is Google Social Graph APIs but again this is only for techies, specifically web developers. Non-web developers and even web designers might not be well suited to understand the APIs. I heard that Google Social Graph APIs came about after this excellent article Thoughts on the Social Graph by Brad Fitzpatrick (since hired by Google and is responsible for delivering Google Social Graph APIs) and

David Recordon (Six Apart). 
Note that Googe Social Graph APIs only work on data after Googlebot has crawled it, so for real-time testing, Google created a test parser URL at

http://socialgraph.apis.google.com/testparse

You can see the Google test parser documentation here. Anyone can send a HTTP POST request to the test parser URL and see the Google Social Graph API results. One of DataPortability.org contributor, Julian Bond, implemented a simple wrapper page around the test parser URL. If you go to the wrapper page and enter this post URL, you will get the following results



SG Test Parser http response: 200

List of outgoing "me" edges

http://twitter.com/bobngu/

http://www.linkedin.com/in/bobngu/

http://friendfeed.com/bngu

http://ungeekdapo.wordpress.com/

...the rest of the output deleted for brevity



Basically the list of outgoing "me" edges is the Google Social Graph output for the rel=me links I added in this post. 
Final Thoughts

When I started looking at rel=me, my initial thought was, quoting Sherlock Holmes, "It's elementary, my dear Watson" but it's far from elementary as you can see. XFN and microformats are talked about way more in blogs than actually being practiced in the wild. I first started to check for XFN capable sites off this page and a lot of the XFN capable site links are broken, either the site no longer exists or the information is incomplete. It is definitely not a page for non-techies. I did find the one (as mentioned above) site that provided readable microformat information. I also know that Mahalo (a new search engine) also now supports microformat in their results.
At this time, I can honestly say that XFN rel=me proliferation is limited and experimental at best. It would take a while for mass adoption to happen and requires a lot of user education, adoption by popular social sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc, and native browser support.



Up late again
pdxbenjamin — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:55:00 +0000
Last night Kristen came over and we chatted for a bit. She brought me a soda and I sold her my 19inch monitor.
I'm up late tonight watching all the Matrix movies ... I'm half way though Reloaded, and prepairing for the suckage. Last time I watched the series the last movie sucked. eh.
I got to a major milestone on mostlymobile.org.
http://www.mostlymobile.org/v4/home.php
It now finds "me" xfn attributes inside the "contact" xfn attribute return data... And that is pretty sweet. This is the first and second step to creating a cache for the air/mobile application that will power the smoothy.  s.php will be the base algorithm for everything to follow.
Next step is to database results and share that data to a yet to be built air app.



The Web of tomorrow
mantrid — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 23:15:34 +0000
I read yesterday a very good article about current trends and ways the web is currently developing. The article describes what I and many others observe. The authors gathered up various signals in one place and summarized what is going on around us.
They do not try to predict what the web will look like in five years, instead they analyze current technologies, their power, adoption rate, benefits and dangers.
As we all  look forward to the advent of Semantic Web, there are quite difficult issues with common standards. The articles reviews RDF potential. The authors point out that RDF itself is too complex for most people to use it vastly and that microformats like XFN may have a greater adoption. They also mention about uprising possibilities of tools like Calais that automatically provide semantical information from given text by identifying people, events, countries etc.
One of the main concerns is portability and open platforms like Open Social or Facebook ecosystems. The authors point out that Google or Microsoft may not be interested in supporting portability efforts like openID since they have own solutions that are part of their core business.
The web is changing and we have more and more web services or APIs like those that Google, Ebay or Amazon provide. This raises important concerns about privacy issues, especially control over user's data. As services use many external services user data are transferred between systems while the user may not be fond of disclosing them to third partied. Often the user doesn't even know about those transfers since they are executed on the server side.
Web services and APIs gain popularity and that make the biggest players like Google, MS or Yahoo in more control over data. While people today complain that mass-media are controlled by a small number of companies, we could soon also find ourselves in situation that most online services would fall into their hands too. In recent days Google has just announced it App Engine - a platform for hosting web applications. Such consolidation isn't necessary good.
As web services and APIs are mostly free to use, more and more mahups appear, and the authors mention that it could lead to flood the internet with useless portals that only replicate information from externals sources. It could be harder to find valuable information as a high number of mashups would be appear in search results higher than reliable sources.
Spam is also participating in building communities. MySpace and Facebook are polluted by fake accounts which sole purpose is adverting of SEO positioning. The authors forecasts that it will lead to fragment big international communities into smaller ones, perhaps concentrated around narrowed topics and common interests only.
They also see open source movement to gain influence and that many businesses will be forced to rethink their business models. Open source proves to be healthy business and a better way to build software. Companies are going to contribute to open source more, and generate revenue from services for their open source products rather than selling proprietary stuff.



One identity, multiple networks ...
InformationSpan — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:01:10 +0000
Brighton BarCamp (see my post here) raised a question that's been insistent in my mind for some time. Social computing sites (including virtual worlds) multiply like rabbits. How do you manage that? As I put it at the time:
The second day of BarCamp was illuminated by several conversations about the future of Social Networks (is there one? will multiplicity kill them off? is Facebook past it or you ain’t seen nothin’ yet? what about identity sharing with XFN and similar frameworks?)
Being a bit long in the tooth, I've been here before. A dozen or so years ago, I wrote the initial business case that took the company I worked for onto the Web. It was possible, then, to have a pretty good go at listing all the sites that were relevant to a pharmaceutical company and my IT colleagues. But of course that didn't last long.
Another lesson from the past is that human beings are a gregarious species: we communicate. Almost any network technology goes person-to-person. The telephone, it was thought, would be used to broadcast church services and concerts. We know what happened. On France's Minitel, perhaps the only really successful teletext service, the greatest successes were the interpersonal applications – not the databases. The Web's going the same way: still lots of good information out there to browse, but Web 2.0 is all about the person-to-person Web: blogs, wikis, virtual worlds, social platforms and no doubt other things still to come.
The multiplicity of websites gave rise to the search engine. But when it's multiple platforms that all carry part of your life, that's not going to help.
Solutions are beginning to emerge: integration technologies to pull your life streams into one place. It's not just what you put out there: it's keeping in touch with your friends on different platforms. Here's some of what's going on; maybe the techies can comment with others.
Jabber links multiple instant messaging platforms. Corporate closed IM services are beginning also to open up to the outside world. It's a great help to doing business.
Any RSS reader, pulling together feeds from any number of places but, in this context, perhaps particularly from blogs you want to keep up with. I like Google Reader.
OpenSocial is intended to link social networking platforms: led by Google (which includes YouTube, remember) with, among others, Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart and the database giant Oracle.
XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is Semantic Web technology to assert links between different web sites or services which are "you", like this blog, my Pocket Website, and my base InformationSpan website. See the blogroll for links!
Now there's Thwirl, downloadable software that plugs directly into Twitter. Twhirl, lets you post to three services at once: Twitter, plus the similar services Pownce and Jaiku, according to the report in MIT's Technology Review.
And Technology Review also reports on the MOGBox, which will let you design a high-resolution 3-D character and transport it as an avatar to multiple virtual worlds. It wouldn't link the worlds themselves, but at least you can look the same everywhere without having to recreate.
Come to that, SMTP was the unifying technology for email. In the early days there were two addressing conventions on the Internet and proprietary closed systems like AOL as well ...
So you have to bet on the unifying power of the human spirit to pull together these threads.
Links:

• Consolidating Your Web Banter Technology Review, 9 Apr 2008

• One Avatar, Many Worlds Technology Review, 8 Apr 2008

• OpenSocial (Google)

• XFN

• Jabber.org the Jabber project

• Thwirl "a desktop Twitter client"

• MOGBox announced (Mogware blog, 19 Feb 2008)

• Minitel (Wikipedia)



Inter-Networking!?
anthroponetworking — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:54:27 +0000
Bei dem Thema Networking muss das Internet eine Rolle spielen, um nicht am Zeitgeist vorbei zu schreiben.
Insbesondere das Bloggen ist eine Möglichkeit über mannigfache Weise zu networken. Um nicht  lange um den heißen Brei herum zu reden. Ein Best-Practice-Beispiel findet sich unter dem schlichten Namen SG für Software Guide.
Der Autor hat gründlich recherchiert und den Klassiker von Robert Basic antizipiert. Mit 102 Trackbacks/Pings ist die Seite der reinste Networker. Hiermit werden Links über Kommentare zu dem eigenen Blog gesetzt und dank eines Links von der eigenen Seite vom Spam abgehoben und zur Kür.
Vor dem Stop der Kommentarfunktion hatten 83 Kommentare fast nur Lob zum Inhalt.
Networkingtools die der Artikel nennt sind: Signatur, Suchmaschinen, Social-Bookmarking-Services, Liste ähnlicher Beiträge, Artikelserien, Events, Aktionen.
Eine weitere Evaluation in der Blogosphäre ergibt, dass weniger die Tools als viel mehr die harte Arbeit der tausendfachen Verlinkung über Foren und Pings effektiv ist und sogar die Wirkung der traditionellen Massenmedien in den Schatten stellt.
Aber was ist denn mit XFN als Alternative zu Social Communities?



comunicando blogs
yerart — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:30:27 +0000
Ayer mientras editaba una entrada de mi diario, me he dado cuenta de que existen algunas opciones y campos en el panel de edición, que nunca he utilizado y que son muy interesantes.
En primer lugar está la opción de permitir pings. Según el glosario de wordpress, la técnica del pingback (ver el artículo de la wikipedia sobre el asunto) permite notificar al autor de una entrada en el blog que se le ha citado o enlazado (siempre que su sistema de blog permita estas notificaciones) Eso actúa como un mecanismo de reconocimiento similar al que se pone en los artículos científicos al citar otros trabajos científicos como referencias. Por los visto existe una especificación de la manera de hacerlo. Existe una opción similar llamada TrackBack (ver el artículo de la wikipdedia sobre el asunto), que ayuda a notificar a otro autor que has escrito algo similar al artículo en cuestión, ampliándolo o simplemente relacionándolo (aunque no se tenga un enlace al mismo) Estas dos opciones sirven para interconectar blogs.
En wordpress existe otro mecanismo  en el Blogroll, la lista de Blogs favoritos, que permite enlazar los blogs utilizando XHTML Friends Network (XFN™) Esto me recuerda que existe un estándar similar para unir personas llamado FOAF (Friend Of A Friend), definida como una ontología para describir personas.
Siguiendo con el tema, al navegar por otros blogs de wordpress me he dado cuenta de que se mantiene la barra superior y hay un enlace/botón que se llama Press It. Por lo visto es un medio rápido para enlazar artículos interesantes en forma de enlaces en cuanto los has leído.



DaPo Acronym Soup
Bob Ngu — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 16:17:41 +0000
In my first post, I said that DaPo list of existing open source technology reads like an acronym soup, here's why (below extracted from DaPo site).

Authentication Standards

User authentication - openID
API authentication - oAuth

Data Transfer, Interchange, and Exchange Standards 
These standards enable data dumps via import and export across data spaces on the Web. They also aid publish and subscribe methods of data exchange. The list includes:

Messaging - XMPP
Syndication - Atom and RSS
Attention - APML
Services and Service Discovery - YADIS and XRDS
Subscriptions - OPML
Personal details - hCard
Relationships - XFN
Personal Profile Data & Social Networks - FOAF
Online Communities - SIOC  (discussed at SIOC-DEV)
Publishing data - AtomPub

Linked Data or Data Referencing Standards
These standards enable access to data by reference via HTTP based data object identifiers called URIs. The list includes:

HTTP based URIs (for Location, Value, and Structure independent Object / Resource Identifiers) 
Personal Profile Data & Social Networks - FOAF
Online Communities - SIOC  (discussed at SIOC-DEV)
Other Schemas and Vocabularies in the Semantic Web realm

Other standards
Other standards groups and initiatives that may not yet have a place in the Blueprint, but still deserve help and support!

Content Identity Validation - MicroID
REST
RDF, XML, JSON


Despite the acronym soup, I found it to be the most useful page on the site because it lists all the open source technology promoted by DaPo. Now I just need to research each acronym to understand the technology, I will write subsequent posts on each technology as I get to it. 
Note that there are policies and legal aspects to DaPo also which I am ignoring, at least for now.



XFN, czyli relacje dla społeczności
lukasztyrala — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:42:25 +0000
XFN to skrót od XHTML Friends Network, czyli sieć przyjaciół dzięki XHTMLowi (w swobodnym tłumaczeniu) i służy do tworzenia powiązań pomiędzy osobami do których linkujemy na blogach, stronach domowych, serwisach ze zdjęciami i wszelkich portalach społecznościowych.

[+] XFN, jak to działa i jego możliwości
Teoria
Powyższy obrazek prezentuje hipotetyczna sytuacje, w której Ty i jeszcze dwie inne osoby macie parę stron WWW lub profili na różnych serwisach. Załóżmy teraz, że na każdym z tych serwisów wszyscy mają inny login. Jedyne relacje, jakie można zaprezentować są takie (pkt.  B):

Na portalu z profilami zawodowymi znalazłeś znajomego, stasiu76 i dołączyłeś go do znajomych

Ze swojej strony domowej (stronadomowa.com) linkujesz do znajomego, który jest grafikiem i prowadzi serwis freelancerowicz.pl
Twój znajomy grafik chodzi na ryby, a w informacjach o sobie umieścił linki do odwiedzanych przez siebie często stron, wśród których jest blog narybach, należący do kolegi, z którym na co dzień współpracuje

I to tyle, co wiesz. Ty nie interesujesz się rybami, więc nigdy nie klikałeś w linki na stronie znajomego grafika, a ten ostatni nie ma pojęcia, że zalogowałeś się do jakiegoś portalu z profilami zawodowymi i to jeszcze pod nazwą ty1973.
Teraz wyobraź sobie, że można utworzyć sieć opisującą relacje pomiędzy poszczególnymi osobami i ich stronami. Tytaniczne wyzwanie? Otóż nie. Rozwiązanie jest banalne w założeniu. Wystarczy szczypta wiedzy o XHTMLu (technologii tworzenia stron WWW) lub serwis, który obsługuje XFN (np. Wordpress):

Na swoim blogu, dodając link do własnej strony WWW dodajesz relację, która mówi, że to Twoja własna strona, czyli me. W języku XHTML wygląda to tak: <a href="http://stronadomowa.com" rel="me">strona domowa.com</a>. Do pierwotnego adresu dodaliśmy tylko rel="me" — nic więcej
Analogicznie, na stronadomowa.com link do znajomego grafika opisujesz, jako friend 
Podobnie robi John Doe i Jan Kowalski – opisują linki, podając zależność, jaka pomiędzy osobami występuje.

Dzięki temu, dochodzimy z pkt.  B, w którym wiedzieliśmy niewiele, do punktu C. Dzięki XFN dowiadujesz się, że stasiu76 to współpracownik freelancerowicza.pl. Wiesz już też, że znajomy grafik też prowadzi bloga, na dodatek, w tym samym serwisie co Ty, do którego nie umieścił odnośnika na swojej stronie stronie głównej. Freelancerowicz również dowiaduje się o tym, że Ty znasz stasia76, itd.
W praktyce
Osoby, które same nie budują stron, muszą polegać na opcjach udostępnianych przez serwisy. Wordpress oferuje szybkie określanie relacji. W zakładce Blogroll, edytując lub dodając nowy link, wystarczy rozwinąć pasek XFN i wybrać odpowiednią relację.
Twórcy stron muszą dodać odpowiednie atrybuty do swoich linków (rel="…"). Opis atrybutów jest dostępny na stronie XFN. Można też zgłosić swoją stronę, do katalogu XFN. Trzeba również wyszukiwarki poinformować o tym, że strona obsługuje XFN — do znacznika wystarczy dodać 
Google udostępniło ostatnio Social Graph API, narzędzie pozwalające śledzić powiązania opisane powyżej.
Zalety

Szybki import znajomych, przy rejestrowaniu się w nowych serwisach
Kontrola nad posiadanymi profilami i stronami, na których się logowało
Możliwość zawarcia znajomości, ze znajomymi znajomych
Możliwość ustalenia, że nasz znajomy jest też znajomym naszego innego znajomego (uff!)
Prawdopodobieństwo, że XNF będzie implementowany dla coraz to nowych zastosowań (np. wyszukiwanie informacji w obrębie wszystkich grup swoich znajomych, lub wśród wybranych relacji) 
Banalność założeń i ich łatwa implementacja, zgodna ze standardami, nie korzystająca z jakiegokolwiek skryptowania (w obrębie samej strony)

Wady

Możliwość ustalenia powiązań pomiędzy osobami, przez niepowołane osoby trzecie
Odkrywanie się w sieci
Ogólnie, wszelkie niepożądane zachowania osób, które nas nie lubią, lub przestępców wyszukujących dane o różnych osobach

Więcej:
Wikipedia (en)
Artykuł o Google Social Graph API (Digital Web Magazine)
***



XFN als Altenative zu moderierten social networks
anthroponetworking — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:50:39 +0000
Neue sozio-technische Errungenschaften veränderten die Welt. Sie entstanden stets durch Menschen und Dinge.
Sozialisation von Technik
In Zukunft könnte die Software wichtiger werden. In einem integrierten, weiterhin konvergenten Bereich wie ihn die Digitalisierung der Daten mit sich bringt, kommt es immer stärker auf die Inhalte und deren Verwaltung an.
Die Überflutung des Internet seit der Einführung des so genannten Web 2.0 oder der Blogosphere - in der Sie lesen - ist ein weiterer Schritt in Richtung Realisierung von Visionen der Pioniere des digitalen Zeitalters. Ähnlich wie die Einführung einer graphischen Benutzeroberfläche eröffnet sie einer steigenden Anzahl von Menschen die Möglichkeit sich massenmedial zu präsentieren.
Die intuitive Benutzeroberfläche hängt jedoch stets von den Kenntnissen der Nutzer ab.
Veränderung und ihre doppelten Folgen
Deshalb setzt sie neue Standards oder Präskriptionen, mit denen sich Menschen auseinandersetzen - müssen. Das kann eine anstrengende Entwicklung bezüglich der Selektion neuer Aspiranten bedeuten - auf beiden Seiten.
Die Aspiranten benötigen mehr Wissen und Fähigkeiten um auf sich aufmerksam zu machen und die Selektoren haben die Qual der Wahl, welche Informationen ihnen letztlich am aufschlussreichsten die Qualifikation erschließen.
Bei meinem letzte Bewerbungsgespräch bei der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung wurde ich damit konfrontiert. Mein X-ing-Profil wurde direkt zerlegt, dafür steht es nun mal googelbar im Netz: Feedback zur eigenen Person, um Leistung zu bringen.
Etwas unbekannter und damit im Web meist implizit uninteressanter sind Wissensplattformen, die einer Gemeinschaft eine alternative Form des Publizierens ermöglichen.
Freies Networking - unabhängig von Internetplattformen
Gerade bin ich auf XFN (Xhtml Friends Network) gestoßen, als ich ein paar Links zu meinem Blogroll hinzugefügt habe. Die Informationsseiten beeindrucken durch die neue, freie nicht plattformgebundene Möglichkeit des Networking durch erweiterte HTML-Kodes.
Mit einer Art Rating, das an die URL, den Hyperlink, die Internetadresse angehängt wird, können die Beziehungen des Verlinkenden zu dem Verlinkten repräsentiert werden.
Eine Software ermöglicht verschiedene Darstellungen dieser Beziehungen, die auch durch verschiedene Gestaltung der einzelnen Links - etwa nach Kategorien - anderen Nutzern oder dem Verlinker, bzw. Blogger die Möglichkeit geben sich schnell zu orientieren.
Es bestehen zahlreiche Möglichkeiten dies zu nutzen. Hat jemand bereits  einschlägige Erfahrungen damit gesammelt und kann davon berichten?



Personal Zeitgeist
Lee Kelleher — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:25:36 +0000
I've finally started work on my zeitgeist page.  My personal projects have been on the back-burner, as I've (obviously) had other things to think about!
Personal Zeitgeist is very easy to get up and running, although I have been making a lot of tweaks - mostly to satisfy my own coding preferences; for example: renaming the *.inc files to *.inc.php - so that nobody else can view the source-code. (That's been one of my long-term gripes with, the otherwise brilliant, SimplePie).
I'll most likely do a lot more customisation to the zeitgeist template/theme before I set it as my default web-page.
Here are a few of the things I want it to do:

Act as my OpenID delegate (I haven't yet decided who to use as my default OpenID provider - most likely be WordPress.com)
Display a set of links to all my external web-profiles (i.e. flickr, last.fm, etc.) - along with corresponding favicons, XFN and OPML. (Actually it's probably easier to store them as OPML in the first place.)
I'm also considering adding some tag cloud functionality - just to quench my thirst for tagging.
Develop a few functions; specifically an email obfuscator (most likely lift the code from wp-includes)

Who knows when I'll be able to do all this... especially when my other commitments are quite demanding! ;-)



Some challenges in current DataPortability trends
Chris Saad — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 05:21:05 +0000
In the last couple of weeks there have been a number of very positive steps forward for Data Portability in general and the DataPortability Project specifically.
These include wins by the OpenID Foundation, the IC report, the DataPortability Report and others.
A couple of trends, though, are causing me a little concern and may require a slight course correction before they spin out of control and fragment, rather than standardize, the ecosystem.
1. Tightly coupled OpenID Implementations
On Plaxo right now there is a 'Sign in with YahooID' button. This is effectively an OpenID login mechanism, except to remove the user experience complexity of OpenID, Plaxo has worked with Yahoo to make it easier by creating a direct relationship.
This seems antithetical to the promise of OpenID and could ultimately create another mess of tightly coupled vendor relationships that defeat the purpose of a single sign-on identity that any provider can provide and consume.
A more long term solution must be to improve the generic OpenID user experience or devise an education campaign to help users learn the new login process.
2. Google's Social Graph API
While revealing an enormous usefulness in the existing XFN and FOAF data out on the web, Google's Social Graph API also reveals a weakness in current XFN and FOAF implementations. Many users are not aware when XFN data is included around URLs they enter, much less when the URLs are marked as rel=me.
For example when Twitter asked me for my homepage, I didn't understand that I was asserting a semantic link from Twitter to my blog that Google would later document and carve into stone as part of its implicit global social network in the sky.
As it stands, there is a real concern for user backlash as these APIs start being implemented and users find themselves presented with eerily accurate information about themselves magically appearing on websites without their 'consent'.
Some sort of best practice text and/or iconography is required around fields that will be marked up with XFN - particularly if rel=me will be used to that users can make informed decisions about the type of data they provide and how it might be used. Perhaps even an opt out checkbox is appropriate.
This is probably a job for the Microformat community to dig into and solve. They should probably solve it quickly though.
3. OpenSocial++ 
As OpenSocial implementations role out, it's becoming clear that there is no such thing as a pure OpenSocial container. Each container includes proprietary APIs and extensions that widget developers may choose to use.
Presumably these exist to differentiate each network and encourage developers to write enhanced apps for the environment.
The problem, though, is that developers need to write defensively for each custom API leading us to a place similar to browser compatibility hell. App developers will need to write and test their apps across every Container and will either have to hard code support for special APIs or keep their apps generic and ordinary.
Is this sustainable? Is there a better way?
If OpenSocial is going to be the Write Once, Deploy Many model for widgets, then the OpenSocial team at Google need to find a way to address this concern quickly.



XFN-friendly ?
maailmalainen — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:30:00 +0000
XFN est un microformat qui permet très simplement de créer votre réseau social via les liens sur votre blogue ou site personnel.
Comment ça fonctionne ?
Vous devez juste ajouter un attribut rel à vos liens. Cet attribut définit la relation que vous avez avec la personne proposant le site vers lequel vous pointez. Simple comme bonjour ! Un petit exemple :
Nous sommes donc allés avec <a rel="friend met" href="http://guillaume.exemple.com">Guillaume</a> et ...
Les différentes valeurs possibles de l'attribut rel sont les suivantes (à séparer par un espace) : friend acquaintance contact met co-worker colleague co-resident neighbor child parent sibling spouse kin muse crush date sweetheart me.
Exploiter XFN
Vous pouvez rajouter votre site sur RubHub pour permettre à d'autres de chercher et voir les relations que vous entretenez. Il existe aussi de simples "lecteurs" de contenu XFN comme XFN Dumper v0.21 (tout dans le fond de la page, pour une raison obscure, blogger ne parse pas correctement si je met le lien directement ici, désolé)
Prochaine étape : association avec FOAF ?