mattw.fn_blog()

Poking around on google, I found plink, a social network that I’m *apparently* a part of. Because I publish Friend-of-a-Friend information in my foaf.rdf, plink has all my information, and I only have to update it locally. If your FOAF has geo encoding, you get a spiffy map and a list of people near your location as well as links to local news headlines.

One thing that I found somewhat alarming, however, is that several people near me have not been added by publishing a FOAF, but because they are signed up on Dean for America. The feed that shows up under the FOAFS tag (http://feeds.deanforamerica.com/foafFeed.php?memberID=XXXXX) is now non-existent and redirects to Democracy for America. To me, it looks like it was spidered to populate the database since there are not a ton of people publishing FOAF yet, but looking at the privacy policy on Democracy for America, my guess is that they did it without permission. I wonder if anyone else has noticed.