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XFN Discovery
I have been thinking about writing some scripts that does analysis of how people have relationships with each other in the blogosphere. Obviously I am going to base this on XFN which just seems to be the most widely used format for expressing relationships between people. I can then use a variety of existing microformats parsers out there or just write my own. However, I'm unfortunately not so sure about the completeness of this.
To illustrate my problem, let's use an example. Stii has his XFN information on the front page of his blog. If my crawler starts at his blog, I would gather a list of the links in his blogroll and then start checking each one of those links for XFN information. Then I would take each one of those links and carry on until I visited all the different blogs.
This works fine if everybody is publishing their complete XFN contact lists on the front pages of their blogs. However, in reality it doesn't work like that. Firstly, if I had to list all the people in my Facebook account alone, I have more than a hundred people! All the people I am linked to in total across the various social networking sites would probably end up making one massive page! That I would certainly not want to put on the front page of my blog.
In addition to that, take this case. Stii is linking in his XFN list to this blog. However, my XFN contacts are not on this blog; it's actually currently on the front page of my main site.
Here many people would probably be talking about Yadis; however if we link to our OpenID providers and FOAF documents from link elements in our head sections, why not do something similar for XFN documents. For example:
<link rel="xfn" href="http://charlvn.za.net/">Any thoughts?
Copyright © 2004-2009 Charl van Niekerk. All articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 South Africa licence, unless where otherwise stated.
2 Comments
Comment by
stii on Friday, June 06, 2008 5:48:00 AM
Great idea! Now to get it implemented...
Comment by
Charl van Niekerk on Saturday, June 07, 2008 4:03:00 PM
Cool Stii please go ahead and lemme know. I think we must make a spec out of this though. Must I mail the microformats community perhaps?
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