It would be really cool if Technorati or Bloglines (or Google, or BlogBridge, or Antarcti.ca, or PlumbDesign, or someone else) created a visual relationship mapping tool for the connections between individuals online.
I suppose it would have to be “Identity 2.0” driven, since people may have more than one online presence (a primary blog, a work blog, a personal blog, a Flickr account, a Del.icio.us account, etc…) and the value is showing relationships between people and not software.
Something like the FlickrGraph for my account – showing visually the relationships in the Flickr community. What if that got extended beyond the borders of Flickrstan?
I suppose a visual interface for a machine-managed FOAF directory based on links rather than explicit declarations would do the trick… What I’m imagining is a way for communities to form automatically and dynamically based on linking – something that may be completely borked thanks to the silly
Bonus points for an alternate view based on Frappr.
Update: Something like Foafnaut (sample display), but I think relying on manually crafted FOAF files is pretty limiting – only hard-core geeks will take part, and what is needed is an inclusive everybody-in-the-pool approach…
Update: Took a first stab at generating a FOAF file using FOAF-a-matic. It’s woefully incomplete, and FOAF only understands one type/level of relationship – everyone is “Friend” – so you can’t say “I work with these people, hang out with these ones, met these ones at conferences, follow these blogs…” So, I’m not sure how useful FOAF would be for mapping relationships. The fidelity is pretty low…
Update: There’s a project to include FOAF support in WordPress, via the Links manager. It also includes support for marking relationships as Trusted via the ratings on the link…
It would be really cool if Technorati or Bloglines (or Google, or BlogBridge, or Antarcti.ca, or PlumbDesign, or someone else) created a visual relationship mapping tool for the connections between individuals online.
I suppose it would have to be “Identity 2.0” driven, since people may have more than one online presence (a primary blog, a work blog, a personal blog, a Flickr account, a Del.icio.us account, etc…) and the value is showing relationships between people and not software.
Something like the FlickrGraph for my account – showing visually the relationships in the Flickr community. What if that got extended beyond the borders of Flickrstan?
I suppose a visual interface for a machine-managed FOAF directory based on links rather than explicit declarations would do the trick… What I’m imagining is a way for communities to form automatically and dynamically based on linking – something that may be completely borked thanks to the silly
Bonus points for an alternate view based on Frappr.
Update: Something like Foafnaut (sample display), but I think relying on manually crafted FOAF files is pretty limiting – only hard-core geeks will take part, and what is needed is an inclusive everybody-in-the-pool approach…
Update: Took a first stab at generating a FOAF file using FOAF-a-matic. It’s woefully incomplete, and FOAF only understands one type/level of relationship – everyone is “Friend” – so you can’t say “I work with these people, hang out with these ones, met these ones at conferences, follow these blogs…” So, I’m not sure how useful FOAF would be for mapping relationships. The fidelity is pretty low…
Update: There’s a project to include FOAF support in WordPress, via the Links manager. It also includes support for marking relationships as Trusted via the ratings on the link…
Related
> FOAF only understands one type/level of relationship – everyone is “Friendâ€
Not exactly. FOAF allows you to declare whom you KNOW. It may be a friend, or not. The name of the project (“Friend of a friend”) is a little disturbing.
You can also use “Relationship” associated to FOAF
http://vocab.org/relationship/
in order to describe relationships between people.
See for example my FOAF file :
http://www.pascal-grouselle.net/foaf.rdf
Ah. Cool. Thanks, Pascal. I guess it was a limitation of the FOAF-a-matic tool, which didn’t provide any further clarification of relationship types.
Hi
There’s a product called Cortege from a UK software house that provides an interactive map of your Outlook contacts and does many of the things you want.
Perhaps we should persuade them to make a hosted version?
Their link is http://www.personal-software.com.
Cheers, Jaye