[[!meta  title="Friend of a Friend"]]

[FOAF][] is an [RDF][] language describing social networks and related
information.  FOAF tries to social networking available to the
[Semantic Web][], making your identity and friendships machine
readable.  An interesting FOAF application, if you have enough
tech-savy friends is [Foaf+SSL][].  For an intuitive explanation of
how FOAF+SSL works, take a look at Henry Story's [paradigm shift][PS]
post.

For the curious, I've created [[my own FOAF file|foaf.rdf]].  You
should also check out the [SIOC Project][SIOC]'s [Semantic Radar][SR]
plugin, which notifies you of the existence of interesting RDF data as
you browse the web (and inspired my [[rel-vcs]] plugin).

The [foaf:mbox_sha1sum][] property can be generated with:

    $ echo -n 'mailto:you@example.com' | sha1sum

[FOAF]: http://www.foaf-project.org/
[RDF]: http://www.w3.org/RDF/
[Semantic Web]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
[FOAF+SSL]: http://esw.w3.org/Foaf%2Bssl
[PS]: http://blogs.sun.com/bblfish/entry/the_foaf_ssl_paradigm_shift
[SIOC]: http://sioc-project.org/
[SR]: http://sioc-project.org/firefox
[foaf:mbox_sha1sum]: http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/#term_mbox_sha1sum

[[!tag tags/blogging]]
[[!tag tags/web]]