How it works: The Web Originally uploaded by danbri Or, “but what do all those links mean?” Based on the 1994 slides by TimBL which inspired the SWAD-Europe graphics and shirt. The twist here is just an emphasis that the giant global graph is a graph of idiosyncratic claims, and only sometimes do we all [...]
I’ve been using the SPARQL query language to access a very ad-hoc collection of personal and social graph data, and thanks to Bengee’s ARC system this can sit inside my otherwise ordinary WordPress installation. At the moment, everything in there is public, but lately I’ve been discussing oauth with a few folk as a way [...]
I’m digesting some of the reactions to Google’s recently announced Social Graph API. ReadWriteWeb ask whether this is a creeping privacy violation, and danah boyd has a thoughtful post raising concerns about whether the privileged tech elite have any right to experiment in this way with the online lives of those who are lack status, [...]
I’ve lately started writing up and prototyping around a use-case for the “Group” construct in FOAF and for medium-sized, partially private data aggregators like SparqlPress. I think we can do something interesting to deal with the social pressure and information load people are experiencing on sites like Flickr and Twitter. Often people have rather large [...]
This just arrived in my mailbox, sneaking past my spam filters. While it advertises the most horrible spamsite, the words are strangely hypnotic… Hei, Inncrease your S.[E].X.U.AL health! Sane, recalled me from these fantastic speculations. Miss believer, please tell me in your own words do without them. footnote: ‘a description of nova friar, sent an [...]
A fair few people have been asking about FOAF exporters from Facebook. I’m not entirely sure what else is out there, but Matthew Rowe has just announced a Facebook FOAF generator. It doesn’t dump all 35 million records into your Web browser, thankfully. But it will export a minimal description of you and your Facebook [...]
OK so I just stumbled upon this… …via Jonathan Chetwynd’s ever-inventive and SVG-happy Peepo.com. The “Car Bomb in Baghdad” story is from a site created by Widgit Software, and explains itself as follows: Symbolworld has been set up to provide a web site with material suitable for symbol readers of all ages. The internet is [...]
Facebook in many ways is pretty open for a ‘social networking’ site. It gives extension apps a good amount of access to both data and UI. But the closed world language employed in their UI betrays the immodest assumption “Facebook knows all”. Eric Childress and Stuart Weibel are now friends with Charles McCathienevile. John Doe [...]
So I meant to write about a 1-line piece of Javascript, but ended up with a 5000 word freeform essay on the nature of RDF, XML, validation and so forth. It could probably do with some editing, but for now the words are in pretty much the order they came out of my brain. A [...]