Social media and structured data - Friend of a friend (FOAF)

"Local. Mobile. Social. We're talking about street gangs here. Local mobile social media is for nothing but high-tech street gangs." 
—oOo—

"The dynamic of our society, and particularly our new economy, will increasingly obey the logic of networks. Understanding how networks work will be the key to understanding how the economy works." - Kevin Kelly, New Rules

An important type of network related to understanding the human economy is the human social network.   Describing the wide variety of human relations isn't easy. The Yupik language of the Inuit has a worf for a degree of friendship that translates roughly as "I like you very much, but I wouldn't want to go seal hunting with you." Seal hunting involves long weeks in very close personal contact under difficult circumstances.

Nevertheless, there is a movement to create a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. It is called the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) movement, and this post represents the full extent of my research on the subject.

Resources:

Semantic Web - FOAF
Drupal includes a FOAF module. Drupal is an Open Source social media publishing platform.
FOAF-a-Matic - Generates FOAF XML from user input data.
RDFweb FOAF Project 
FOAF Project Org
FOAF on WIkipedia

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter

Search optimization - structured data

Search optimization
structured data

Structured data is a phrase that covers the general idea of using HTML tag capabilities to mark certain common data types with standardized methods. In recent years, Google has adopted the use of three different structured data type standards for embedding seven common data items:

1. Recipes
2. Reviews
3. Review ratings
4. People
5. Events
6. Businesses and organizations
7. Products

The three structuring standards supported by Google are, RDFa, HTML 5 microdata, and microformats. These differing methods may be used interchangeably.

Example — Business listing using microdata format

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Organization"> 
   <span itemprop="name">Carmen-Thomas Designs</span> <br />
   <span itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Address"> 
   <span itemprop="street-address">1218 S. Second Street</span> <br /> 
      <span itemprop="locality">Louisville</span>
      <span itemprop="region">Kentucky</span> <br />
    </span>
    Phone: <span itemprop="tel">502-230-1613</span>.
    <a href="http://carmen-thomas-designs.blogspot.com/" itemprop="url">http://carmen-thomas-designs.blogspot.com/</a>.
</div>

The above listed code will display as follows:

Carmen-Thomas Designs
1218 S. Second Street
Louisville, Kentucky
Phone: 502-230-16134.
http://carmen-thomas-designs.blogspot.com/.

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
Tom Fox on Twitter