Fuddland
In one of the weirdest duets ever, for the Man on the Moon soundtrack Michael Stipe performs with Jim Carrey reprising his role as Andy Kaufman [and Kaufman’s alter-ego Tony Clifton], covering Fabian’s This Friendly World, and you can’t help but smile [especially when they sing alternate words during one of the verses].
With the skies so full of stars and the river so full of song
Every heart should be so thankful[…]
The world is such a wonderful place to wander through
When you’ve got someone you love to wander along with you
With so much interlinking between weblogs it seems natural to try and form some kind of network beyond “he links to them, she links to me, I link to those people”—generally there’s no indication of what relationship, if any, the linker has with the “linkee”.
A relatively new approach to tackling this issue is the XFN [XHTML Friends Network] protocol, and it’s beautifully simple: all it asks is the addition of the attribute rel to your links, with values selected from a small list of options, and it’s aimed in particular at weblogs.
Probably the most commonly-used values would be met, friend, acquaintance, and one of the work-related values of co-worker or colleague; although some of the values are a bit twee [“sweetheart” instead of, say, “partner”] they cover most of the relationships one might have. I particularly like the conscious decision not to include negative relationships.
For example, if your blogroll contains a link to the weblog of Bob, someone you work with, talk to occasionally, but are not really friends with, you could mark-up the link as
<a href="http://domain.com" title="Bob's weblog" rel="met co-worker colleague acquaintance">Bob</a>,
whereas if it was someone you were good friends with, but didn’t work in the same building or within the same field, the link might be
<a href="http://domain.com" title="Lionel's weblog" rel="met friend">Lionel</a>.
Some links will have no need for a rel attribute, but for those that do qualify it’s very quick and easy to add in the code, and that’s really all the effort required; the rest is up to spidering software to discover the relationships and tie them all together. Despite the early days of XFN, the potential does seem quite nice.
On a local scale, there is the opportunity to indicate different relationships with some CSS attribute selectors [if the browser supports them]:
a[rel~="friend"] {font-weight: bold;}
a[rel~="co-worker"] {text-decoration: underline;}
a[rel~="acquaintance"] {font-style: italic;}
[Example taken from XFN: Introduction and Examples.]
On a global scale, the creators of XFN have their Delusions of Grandeur:
XFN provides the basis for a world-wide distributed network of personal connections. Proprietary data-owning services like Friendster could be superceded by XFN crawling and searching sites—a sort of “Friendorati,” as it were. The advantage of a Friendorati-style network is that it allows every individual to fully express themselves through personal weblogs and web sites, instead of to the limited degree permitted by a proprietary service’s user interface.
Commercial services like Amazon, which currently ask users to manually register all their friends in order to make “wish list” and other information sharing simpler, may find it easier simply to crawl XFN relationships on the open Internet. This would allow a user to enter the URL of their site, and let the service programmatically analyze XFN relationships to build a list of friends.
None of this will be anywhere near possible if nobody starts using the XFN syntax, so I’ve added the appropriate attributes to my links, and also added the data to my blo.gs favourites, since blo.gs supports XFN metadata too.
An early venture is Rubhub, where one can see who has declared their relationships to whom, as well as submit one’s own page or site containing XFN-friendly links. It’s currently very heavily skewed towards the, shall we say, more “technically inclined” weblogger, but hopefully that will change and there will be much more diverse mix of people using XFN declarations in the near future.
The only potential problem I see is not with the system itself, but the ramifications when people see what others have put them down as: “I’m only an acquaintance? So what happened as last year’s Christmas party meant nothing to you? I’ve put you as my sweetheart!”.
