A quiz, I'm bored. And FOAF.

Huh, who'd've thunk it?



I found this quiz while pootling about looking at the FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) site, which looks interesting. It's a way of creating simple machine-readable pages, ie, a page with simple fields (using RDF and XML) that lets the computer read and piece together information from the web. You fill in the FOAF sheet and upload it to your site. I'm not sure what its ultimate purpose is - a way of creating social networks, or to make searches simpler? Another way of finding information about people? I made myself a foaf sheet for one of my other sites (the ones I show to family and friends, of course), just for the curiosity value. There are only certain fields at the moment, such as name, phone number, place of work and names of friends and their email addresses. As a way of tracking groups and friends it's really interesting, but at the same time I'm slightly dubious about shoving my friends's emails and names on the web without asking first.

That reminds me, I was thinking that the tracking meme that recently went round really needs another part; where you make bar charts and graphs showing who the lj connectors are, or those people who seem to act almost as an lj introductory service. As far as I can tell, these sorts of people often rec a lot, have fairly diverse or large friends lists and often have a vibrant online personality. I can think of a few on my friends list who I'd call connectors. There are certain people who have either large or multi-fandom, eclectic friends lists and I know that I like to read their friends list just to see what's going on in other places/fandoms/people's heads. Friendsfriends in other words, except for the bit about having the paid account.

Is anyone a member of Orkut, just out of interest? It's another social networking site, but you have to be invited to join.