Donnerstag, 9. Januar 2003

FOAF - Loosely coupled people: For a while I've been following FOAF ("Friend of a friend") and seeing nice icons like this appear on various weblogs. This article by Ben Hammersley has finally started the wheels to turn in my head. FOAF is certainly something to look into. Here are some examples for real-world scenarios: There was a recent discussion on the free software business list about finding free software consultants. Just one quote from the thread: Your best bet is to be connected enough to the community to be able to find good people via an "I know someone who knows someone" chain. Sound familiar? Now imagine a FOAF network of free software consultants that you can search for say a particular subject. Another example that relates more to large corporations: Inside large software companies, programmers work on certain projects, then move on to other tasks. After a few years it becomes increasingly difficult to reconstruct who worked on a certain module of a particular project back in say 1992. Using a FOAF based skill network, where each employee retains a link to (for example) the project manager and the projects they worked on, it would be easy to reconstruct the team by scanning the FOAF web. Loosely coupled people. Bing.

The West Wing: Watched the first two episodes of The West Wing tonight. Now the series is not on here in Germany so I had to resort to other ..umm.. methods. I'm having problems finding the first episodes (3,4) from the first season, so if you happen to know of a good source..let me know. From what I've seen so far it's really great.

Pingback: I've just installed Simons Pingback client add-on for Radio. Does it work? Let's see if I can Pingback his article. It works! But only sends the Weblog name - what did I miss? That's cool though - great work Simon!