un|we|sen

I’m lucky that I can count Dan Brickley and Libby Miller amongst my acquaintances. Not only did they come up with FOAF, they’re also the awesome sort of people that you can throw half-baked ideas at, and they’ll bounce back with something equally interesting¹.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently mulling on so-called “social media”². There are plenty of things I dislike about “social media” for one reason or another, but there are also plenty of things I like about them.

For those not “in the know”, FOAF — which stands for friend-of-a-friend — somewhat predates the popularity of social media, but has since been overtaken by them a bit. But FOAF isn’t a website, or a service, but an RDF vocabulary that lets you create links between web pages describing people. If you’re technically inclined, the current version of the FOAF specs is here. If you’re not technically inclined, you might want to skip this post entirely.

On the other hand, if you’re very much into RDF, I should issue a different kind of warning: I’m not. While I find the concept fascinating, and see how it can be used to express pretty much any information, I don’t think it should. But that is a topic for another blog post or discussion and doesn’t belong here; suffice to warn you that I propose a rather non-RDF-y thing.

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1. And possibly even related and/or helpful. [↩]
2. I’m sometimes tempted to call them “anti-social media”, but it’s entirely possible that’s just an artefact of me having passed my prime. [↩]