Even better, our joint panel with the Semantic Web folks had a far greater tone of agreement than of acrimony, the latter of which I feared would dominate.  I learned some things there, in fact.  For example, the idea that the Semantic Web efforts are inherently top-down turns out to be false.  It may be that many of the efforts have been top-down, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be.  We also saw examples where Semantic Web technologies are far more appropriate than a microformat would be.  The example Jim Hendler brought up was an oncology database that defines and uses some 600,000 terms.  I would not want to try to capture that in a microformat—although it could be done, I suspect.

Here’s one thing I think is key about microformats: they cause the semantics people already use to be impressed onto the web.  They capture, or at least make it very easy to capture, the current zeitgeist.  This makes them almost automatically human-friendly, which is always a big plus in my book.

The other side of that key is this:  it may be that by allowing authors to quickly annotate their information, microformats will be the gateway through which the masses’ data is brought to the more formal systems the Semantic Web allows.  It very well may be that, in the future, we’ll look back and realize that microformats were the bootstrap needed to haul the web into semanticity.

Tantek and I have had some spirited debates around that last point, and are actually in the middle of one right now.  After all, maybe things won’t go that way; maybe microformats will lead to something else, some other way of spreading machine-recognizable semantic information.  It’s fun to debate where things might go, and why, but I think in the end we’re both willing to keep pushing the concept and use of microformats forward, and see how things turn out down the road.

What’s fascinating is how fired up people get about microformats.  After SXSW05, there was an explosion of interest and experimentation.  Several microformats got created or proposed, covering all kinds of topics—from folksonomy formalization to political categorization.  A similar effect seemed to be occurring at WWW2005.  One person who’s been around long enough to know said that the enthusiasm and excitement surrounding microformats reminded him of the early days of the web itself.

As someone who’s at the center of the work on microformats, it’s hard for me to judge that sort of thing.  But I was there for some of the early WWW conferences, and I remember the energy there.  As I rode home from WWW2 in Chicago, I was convinced that the world was in the process of changing, and I wanted more than anything to be a part of that change.  To hear that there’s a similar energy swirling around something I’m helping to create and define is profoundly humbling.

That all sounds great, of course, but if it remains theoretical it’s not much good, right?  Fortunately, it isn’t staying theoretical at all, and I’m not just talking about XFN.  Want an example of how you could make use of microformatted information right now, as in today?  That’s coming up in the next post, where I’ll show how to make use of a resource I mentioned earlier in this post.

On a very related note, I’ve updated my blogroll with some new met values.  I’ve met a ton of people I’d never met before, and hope to meet still more—so if I do assemble a metroll, it’ll have to wait until I get home.

It’s interesting to see how interest in evolutionary semantics is itself evolving.  A recent example of this is David Berlind‘s ZDNet article “Will social networks give way to social protocols?“.  I firmly believe the answer to be “yes”, even though there are a lot of skeptics (some of them on conference review committees, as it turns out).  Berlind clearly understands the advantage of social protocols.

You might then wonder, “Then what’s up with you writing a whole document about how to set up XFN ‘me’ values in a bunch of services?”  At this stage of social networking, that sort of thing is necessary.  Without interim steps, the information sitting in those services will stay scattered and isolated.  Thanks to the me value, XFN offers a very simple, lightweight solution to the problem of identity consolidation.  As I recently wrote in a poster proposal:

As the Web has evolved, a number of personal-information sites have arisen.  Some of these sites exist to help create and increase professional contacts; others are intended to help bring together one’s friends or even find potential mates.  In every case, however, the user must create a new profile for each site.  Each of these profiles constitutes a small island of identity.  Over time, a person can end up with a fairly extensive identity archipelago.

Unfortunately, there has… been no easily created machine-discoverable way to bridge the gaps between the islands.  An author might publish a page containing links to all his profiles, but to an indexing engine, these links are no more or less notable than his links to the latest amusing Flash animations.

With XFN, it becomes very easy for an author to annotate a link to indicate that its destination is one of the islands in his identity archipelago.  This kind of link is referred to as a “me” link throughout the rest of this paper.  By creating symmetric links between the islands, the author can make it possible to consolidate the various pieces of his online identity into a more cohesive whole.

The same is true for a person’s links to other people.  By pulling them all into one place, or at least by marking them all with XFN and then using “me” links to tie together all the bits of his identity archipelago, real social networking start to emerge.

Now, one of the things that people like to carp about is the limits of XFN.  The first of the two most common complaints are that it’s impossible to capture the full range of human relationships in fifteen words.  We agree.  The other complaint is that we only picked “positive” terms; that is, we have friend but not enemy.  We did that on purpose, as we explained; besides, it’s called XHTML Friends Network, which should be kind of a clue.  Apparently this choice makes us arrogant, or clueless, or some combination thereof.  Maybe that’s so.  What I find interesting is that the people who complain that we didn’t include their preferred relationship terms never do anything about it.  They just complain.  What’s so interesting to me is that the guys who decided to focus on the positive went out and did something; those who want to mix in the negative seem to have nothing to offer except complaints.  That says something, I think.

Because XFN is not, nor was it ever meant or represented to be, the final word on social protocols.  We fully expect it to either be improved, or else superseded.  Suppose one of the critics actually did something to address his concerns, and published an “XHTML Relationships Network”.  This could include all the XFN values, plus their negative counterparts, plus whatever else is thought to be useful by the author(s) of this new XRN.  At that point, you have competing protocols.  The more useful one will win.  The loser will be eventually discarded, although some of its memetic genes may live on.  This isn’t a problem: it’s a strength.

It’s also in many ways the entire point of XHTML Meta Data Profiles.  See a need to fill?  Fill it!  At the end of his column, Berlind says in an update:

Looking at the XFN profile, it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps there should be an XBN/XB2BN that’s strictly for the relationships between businesspeople/businesses. Thoughts?

Here are my thoughts: go for it!  He’s almost certainly right that there’s utility in such a protocol.  All it takes now is for someone to look at the problem and write up an XMDP-based protocol that solves the problem.  The microformat approach makes this so simple, pretty much anyone could do it.  What’s needed is someone who actually will do it.

At some point down the road, it’s possible that the protocols that define personal and professional relationships would merge.  Again, that’s completely in keeping with the vision we have.  The whole point of this kind of ad-hoc semantic enrichment is that it’s evolutionary.  New players will enter the field, and will either prosper or wither.  Anyone can join in.  There is no star chamber of lofty experts to say whether your idea passes some sort of ideological muster.  It’s a great big landscape, and there a million conceptual niches to be filled.

As those niches are filled, the ways in which different protocols interact can trigger truly astounding results… but for thoughts on that aspect of the whole subject, you’ll have to come see my talk.

With the spread of networking sites, people have effectively created identity islands.  My profile on LinkedIn, for example, describes a little bit of my identity.  A Ryze profile would be another part, and an Orkut profile a third.  There would no doubt be some overlap in information, but at the same time each profile will likely have some unique information about me.  The me value can be used to create bridges between these identity islands, providing—possibly for the first time—a way to tie all these disparate bits together in an easily discoverable way.  An XFN search engine (like Rubhub) could use this value to compile a unified identity profile for a person.  Similarly, it should be possible to create a tool that follows me links to pull identity information into one place.  As more profiles are created, new me links can be added and aggregated.

The only real roadblock at the moment is the inability to add XFN links from site profiles back to a central location.  Thus, in the sand dollar diagram, the links out to various services are green (XFN Friendly) while the links back from those services are blue or gray, depending on whether or not there’s an ability to add any kind of link at all.  If every service allowed users to supply a URL for a me link, then the connection would be bi-directional and thus more credible.  We don’t have to wait for that to happen, though.  If I link from meyerweb.com to various profiles with me links, that’s a good start toward consolidating my identity islands.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term kin, it refers to any member of your family, either a blood relative or someone closely related through marriage.  As an example, all of my aunts and uncles are kin, even though half of them aren’t blood relations, having married into the family.  It was the most compact ungendered term we could find besides “family”, which didn’t feel right.

As for me, that was a value we debated for inclusion in 1.0 almost literally up to the hour we released it.  In the end, we cut it because we were resolved to include only those values we felt sure would be useful, thus keeping things as simple and lightweight as possible.  We figured that if people wanted the value, they’d tell us—and they did.  Tantek and I batted around some thoughts concerning uses of me while we were at the conference and I think we may be on to some interesting ideas.  Hopefully they’ll hold up after further discussion.

If you have a comment on XFN 1.1 or an idea for a value we could add to a future version of XFN, let us know.

Now that I’m home, it’s time to list my SXSW04 XFN (those who are newly rel="met", anyway) in the order they came to mind:

• Min Jung Kim
• Jay Allen
• Jane Wells
• Simon Willison
• Ian Lloyd
• James Craig
• Dan Cederholm
• Dave Shea
• Evany Thomas
• Jonas Luster
• Christine Selleck
• Wendy Chisholm
• Anders Pearson
• Ethan Marcotte
• Yvonne Adams
• Kimberly Blessing
• Michael Moncur
• Maggie Berry (Mason)
• Rob Lifford
• Rannie Turingan
• Jonathan Abrams
• Craig Newmark
• Peter Kaminski
• Dinah Sanders
• Chris Wetherell
• Nick Bradbury

If we met for the first time at SXSW04 and I neglected to list you, get in touch and I’ll make with the fixing.

At the Web Awards last night, where Dave Shea quite deservedly walked away with the Developer’s Resource and Best of Show awards for the CSS Zen Garden, Jennifer Neiderst Robbins‘ son Arlo got passed around between Jeff Veen, Anitra Pavka, and Steve Champeon.    It was kind of odd to watch somebody else’s child be subjected to a round of Pass The Baby, and fun to be able to watch the holders without having to worry so much about the baby.  (It’s a parent thing—when someone else is holding your baby, you watch the baby to see what it does.  And to make sure it doesn’t get dropped.)  Arlo never did make it over to me, but that’s okay.  I’d far rather hold Carolyn.  I miss her, and I miss Kat.

During the end-of-day sessions, Tantek delivered a short presentation on XFN during the panel titled “Ridiculously Easy Group Forming.”  Strangely, he was really the only one to directly talk about the easy part, although the Easy Journal portion of the panel did cover ways in which the service is easy.  The audience seemed quite interested in XFN, which was very cool.  Of course, Tantek did a great job of presenting the important core lessons of XFN in relation to social networking solutions; these were, in effect:

1. Tackle a small problem and solve it in a simple way.
2. Release the solution into the wild.
3. Watch adoption spread and tools multiply.

There were many good questions about the structure of XFN from the attendees, to the point that Tantek was afraid he’d hijacked the panel.  I told him that the audience asked about what interested them the most.  In the cheap swag department, Matt printed up stickers and badge inserts that were large versions of the “XFN Friendly” image to distribute, and I spotted several attendees’ badges marked as being friendly.

After the day’s sessions I headed to the “Long Live Webmokey!” party, where I proudly wore my Webmonkey toque and finally met some of the staff members (like Kristin and Evany) with whom I’d swapped many an e-mail back in the day.  When the smoke drove me out of doors, I spent some time chatting with Steve Champeon and Pableux Johnson, who congratulated me on Carolyn’s arrival and were curious to know why Kat and I wanted children.  Even though I’d already had to think about and answer that question last year, I realized I didn’t have any better answer for them than, “It was important to us.”

Feeling worn down, I took in an excellent Italian dinner at Carmelo’s with Molly, Christopher, and Anitra, and then retired to my room for the night.  Shortly thereafter, a thunderstorm swept in from the west, driving rain through the streets.  I spared a sympathetic thought for all the people trying to get from one of the numerous parties to another, and enjoyed the lighting flowing from cloud to cloud and silhouetting the Austin skyline.

[Sorry this update is tardy, but the internet access died on my floor of the hotel last night, and once I reached the conference cloud on Tuesday morning I was too busy saying goodbye to everyone to get online, so posting had to wait until I got home.]

Back in high school, my best friend Dave and I devised a scenario where water shortages in the American southwest became so severe that states literally went to war with each other over water rights and access, fragmenting the United States in the process.  It never really went much of anywhere, just an idea we kicked around, and that I thought about trying to turn into a hex-based strategic wargame but never did.  It’s always lurked in the back of my head, though, the idea of climate-driven warfare.

According to Yahoo! News, a Pentagon report asserts that climate change is a major threat to national security; well, actually, to global security.  And that if the global climate crossing a “tipping point,” the changes will be radical and swift.  In such a situation, economic upheaval will be the least of our concerns—we’ll be more worried about adding to the climate shifts with the aftereffects of nuclear exchanges.

I actually read about this on Fortune.com a few weeks ago, and although now you have to be a member to read the full article at Fortune, there’s a copy at Independent Media TV.  The Fortune article characterizes the report as presenting the possible scenarios if global climate shifts occur, but not claiming that they are happening or will happen.  It also says that the Pentagon agreed to share the unclassified report with Fortune, whereas the Yahoo! News article says the report was leaked after attempts to hush it up.  For that matter, the Yahoo! News article makes it sound like the report claims that The Netherlands will definitely be uninhabitable by 2007, and so on.  According to the Fortune article, that was one aspect of a scenario, not a concrete prediction.  This is probably due to the Yahoo! News article being a summary of an article in The Observer, which is a production of The Guardian and claims to be the “best daily newspaper on the world wide web.”  Uh-huh.

So I guess I’m saying read the Fortune article, as it gives more information and takes a more balanced tone—not that it sounds any less disturbing, really.  The fact that the report was commissioned at all suggests that the subject is being taken seriously at the Pentagon, which is not exactly a gathering place for leftist wackos.  I’ll be very interested to see what reaction, official or otherwise, is triggered by this report in the weeks to come.  My fear is that it doesn’t matter any more, that whatever accusatory words might get thrown around will just be insignificant noise lost in the rising wind.

Tantek also said of the idea of applying CSS to documents that uniquely styles license-links:

I wonder who will be the first to post a user style sheet that demonstrates this.

Ooo, me, me!  Well, not quite.  I don’t have a complete user stylesheet for download, but here are some quick rules I devised to highlight license links.  Add any of them to your user stylesheet, or you can use these as the basis for your own styles.  (Sorry, but they won’t work in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t support attribute selectors.)

/* simple styles */
*[rel~="license"] {font-weight: bold;}
*[rel~="license"] img {border: 3px double; color: inherit;
  padding: 1px;}

/* add a "legal" icon at the beginning of the link */
*[rel~="license"]:before {content: url(legal.gif);}

Here’s my question: should the possible values be extended?  Because I’d really like to be able to insert information based on what kind of license is being referenced.  For example, suppose there were a c-commons value for rel; that way, authors could declare a link to be rel="c-commons license".  Then we could use a rule like:

*[rel~="c-commons"]:before {content: url(c-commons.gif);}

…thus inserting a Creative Commons logo before any link that points to a CC license.  At the moment, it’s highly likely that the only rel="license" links are going to point to CC licenses, but as we move forward I suspect that will be less and less true.  I hope we’ll soon see some finer grains to this particular semantic extension.

If you don’t like using generated content for whatever reason, you could modify the rule to put the icon in the background instead, using a rule something like this:

*[rel~="c-commons"] {background: url(c-commons.gif) no-repeat;
  padding-left: 15px;}

The usual reason to avoid generated content is that IE doesn’t support it, but then IE doesn’t support attribute selectors either, as I mentioned.  So don’t add any of these rules to an IE user stylesheet.  Use Firefox, Safari, Opera, or one of the other currently-in-development browsers instead.

In other news, I was tickled pink (or maybe a dusky red) to see that for sol 34, one of the “wake-up” songs for the Spirit team was The Bobs’ Pounded on a Rock.  My hat’s off to you, Dr. Adler!  I’ve been listening to that particular album recently, mostly to relearn the lyrics.  I’ve been singing to Carolyn when I feed her, and some favorites of ours are Plastic or Paper, Now I Am A Hippie Again, Corn Dogs, and of course Food To Rent.  It’s awfully cute that she smiles at me when I sing to her, mostly because I know one day she’ll grow up, learn about things like “being on key,” and stop smiling when I sing.

In the meantime, though, she’s perfectly happy to rock on!

I’ve spent the last two weeks (minus repair time, of course) running NetNewsWire Lite, and I’ve discovered that it’s addictive in exactly the wrong way: hard to give up, even though I really want to do so.  This is no reflection on the program itself, which is excellent.  The problem I have is with the fundamental experience.

Allow me to explain.  In order to visit all my favorite weblogs/journals/whatever, I had a collection of home page URLs in a group in my favorites toolbar.  That way I could open it up and go straight to a site, or else command-click on the folder to open them all up in tabs.  The whole group would open up, each site to its own tab, and then I could close each tab as I read what was new, or else determined that there wasn’t anything new since the last time I dropped by.

Now, of course, I have an RSS aggregator that tells me when something new has appeared on a site.  Thanks to NetNewsWire, I’ve become much more efficient about keeping up with all the weblogs I read.  I’m also losing touch with the sites themselves, and by extension, with the people behind those sites.

What I’ve come to realize is that half the fun of visiting all those sites was seeing them, in enjoying the design and experience that each author went to the effort of creating—the personality of each site, if you will.  Sure, I’ve seen The Daily Report a zillion times; who hasn’t?  I still got a bit of an emotional boost from dropping by and feeling the orange, even if Jeffrey hadn’t written anything new.  The same goes for mezzoblue, and stopdesign, and all the others.  Maybe it’s the same impulse that makes me play a record I’ve always liked, or re-read a favorite book for the twentieth time.  It doesn’t matter.  Part of my connection to the people behind the sites seems to be bound up in actually going there.  Using an aggregator interrupts that; it lessens the sense of connection.  It distances me from the people I like and respect.

And yet, thanks to that same aggregator, I can keep up with all those weblogs and half again as many news feeds in one tidy package.  The latest Slashdot Science and Apple news, xlab OS X, the W3C, and more feeds come pouring in.  I don’t have any connection with those sites, so that doesn’t bother me; in the case of Slashdot, I actually prefer getting the feeds because it means I can visit the referenced sites without subjecting myself to the comments.

The obvious solution is to strike a balance:  to use the aggregator for news, and go back to my tab group to read personal sites.  I’m going to give it a whirl, although the raw efficiency of the aggregator is so compelling that I feel a deep reluctance to unsubscribe from the personal-site feeds.

That’s what I mean by the experience being addictive in exactly the wrong way.

I suspect that what I may do is keep all the feeds, but when any personal site is updated, I’ll go visit them all by command-clicking the bookmark group.  That way I’ll catch up with the folks who have something new for me to read, and at the same time visit everyone else—just to say, if only to myself, “You’re still there, and I’m still dropping by to see you, and that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

…decided to tackle the problem by taking advantage of the fact that most people’s e-mail comes from a limited social network, and these networks tend to be clustered into clumps where everyone knows each other.

If I understand the concept correctly, those of you who decide, on a whim, to e-mail me with a question about CSS or to comment on something I’ve written would never get through if I were using such a system.  If you’re nowhere near my cluster, then I don’t see how you’re going to get through.  If the only criterion for being assumed a ‘real person’ is that you’re sending from a cluster, then all spammers would have to do is form their own clusters.

I’m quite interested in social networks these days, but I’m not sure that spam is one of the problems a social network can really fix.  At this point, I’m coming to believe that e-mail delivery fees are the only possible solution, and I have grave doubts it would work.  I’ve seen this idea described a few times, and here’s how it generally works.

• Everyone gets to set a cost for accepting mail.  I could say, for example, any message has to have a 10-cent delivery fee paid for me to even accept it.  You might set the threshold at five cents, or 50 cents.
• When sending a message, you authorize up to a certain amount to be paid for delivery.  I might say that I’ll attach three cents to every outgoing message.  For any account with that delivery fee (or lower), the message will reach the inbox, and I’ll be charged three cents.  For any account with a higher delivery fee, the message is bounced back with a “needs more money to get through” error.
• Anyone can choose to refund the delivery fee, either one at a time or by creating a “free entry” whitelist.  So I might set my delivery fee at 50 cents, but permanently give my friends a free pass into the Inbox.  For random correspondents with legitimate inquiries, I could give their delivery fee back.  For spam, I could read it and collect the delivery fee.

It sounds great, and the technology could probably be created without much difficulty.  The general idea is that if you don’t want to see spam, you reject all messages with too low a delivery fee; if you want to stick it to the spammers, you read their messages and collect their money.  I still see a few problems with the idea.

1. If a spammer manages to fool my system into thinking the spam is coming from a friend, it gets in for free.  If the mask is good enough, I never get a chance to collect the fee.
2. Who’s going to volunteer to run the micropayment system that would have to underpin the whole setup?  And if there are no volunteers, then where’s the business model that would be needed to get a company to do it?
3. How does one keep the spammers from hacking, bypassing, or otherwise fooling the micropayment system, and wouldn’t any effective techniques to do so work just as well for the current mail system?
4. Assuming there is a micropayment structure in place, what’s to keep large ISPs from charging everyone a cent to pass a message through their servers—thus making e-mail no longer free for anybody?

Maybe that last point would be an acceptable price to pay for ending spam.  It would pretty much kill off listservs, though, and that would sadden me quite a bit.  Even at a penny per message, every post to css-discuss would cost $35.67 to deliver to all the subscribers (as of this writing).  On average, we get about 50 posts per day, so that’s $1,783.50 daily, or $650,977.50 annually.  If I had that kind of money, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t spend it on a mailing list.  I’d buy a Navy fighter-bomber instead.

On the other hand, with a delivery-fee e-mail system in place, I could very easily set up an account where people could send their CSS questions for a delivery fee of, say, $29.95.  If I accepted delivery, that would get you a detailed answer to your question, or else a refund of the delivery fee if I didn’t answer (or there was no answer to be had).  So that would be kind of cool.  I suppose I could approximate the general idea today using PayPal or some such, but that would mean going to the effort of setting it up, which isn’t something I’m likely to do given that I have no evidence that there’s any real demand for its existence.  Actually, the presence of css-discuss pretty much says that there isn’t, since it’s a whole community of people providing help for free.

So I got started on all that because of the idea of using social networks for spam countermeasures, and like I said I’m interested in social networking these days.  In that vein, I was rather amused to see myself at #2 and #4 on rubhub’s new Top 10 lists, and not in the least bit surprised to find Zeldman sitting atop both lists.

I was also quite fascinated by Jonas’ ruminations on how XFN, VoteLinks, and related technologies can easily form the basis for rudimentary trust networks.  Jonas, a sociologist by training, has been writing some very interesting things about the semantic web and social networking recently, which is why I’ve just added him to my blogroll and RSS aggregator.  As he points out, combining XFN and VoteLinks would be a snap, and has the potential to enrich the semantics of the Web.  Instead of just counting links to a page, a community assessment of that page could be tallied.

What interests me even more is the next step.  What else can be done with link relationships, and how will the pieces fit together?  How many small, modular metadata profiles would it take to begin semanticizing the Web?  I suspect not too many.  This seems like a clear case of emergent properties just waiting to happen, where every incremental addition dramatically increases the complexity of the whole.  John Lennon once said that life is what happens while you’re making other plans.  Meaningful technological advancement seems to be what happens while committees are making other plans.  It could very well be that the Semantic Web will come to pass because the semantic web arose on the fringes and paved the way—that the latter will become the former, simply by force of evolution.  That strikes me as rather poetic, since it means that the principles Tim Berners-Lee followed in creating and defining the Web would become the keys to where he wants to go next.

Based on the feedback to my question yesterday, it seems the #1 reason to link to your Amazon wish list is to help out family members who can’t seem to remember what you like whenever a birthday rolls around.  The other reason given was to provide a window into your interests, which is felt to help foster a sense of familiarity in what can sometimes seem an impersonal medium.  Fair enough.  I did something along those lines when I added the “Reading” feature (with archive) to my personal page.  Perhaps the only real difference is that I’m giving a current and backward glace at my interests, whereas the wish list link provides a forward look.

A couple of people also wrote to say that they actually have had random passers-by send them something off of the wish list, sometimes in thanks for a favor they’d done online, and that it was pretty neat.  I’m not sure I’d feel the same way, but I thought I’d pass along their feelings on the matter.

Speaking of passing things along, I promised that I’d summarize the suggestions I received regarding books presenting reasonable arguments for the conservative point of view.  Here’s the summary.

• Letters to a Young Conservative by Dinesh D’Souza
• Radical Son by David Horowitz
• The Content of Our Character by Shelby Steele
• The Death of Right and Wrong by Tammy Bruce
• First Principles: A Primer of Ideas for the College-Bound Student by Hugh Hewitt
• The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man by J. Budziszewski
• A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat by Zell Miller

I also received e-mail from liberals who had been looking at the same issue, and wanted to mention some books they thought were good.  They are:

• Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell (for a look at both sides)
• The 2% Solution by Matthew Miller
• The Politics of Rich and Poor and other books by Kevin Philips

Please note that I have not read any of the books I just listed, and so am neither recommending nor condemning any of them.  Similarly, I’m passing along an unchecked recommendation for The Weekly Standard, not to be confused with The Weekly Standards.

Those of you more interested in the latter of those two links will probably also be interested in the Web Standards Awards, with three awards to be given every month.  You can submit any site for consideration, whether it be your work or someone else’s, but be sure to check the competition criteria first.  The first three winners are already listed on the site.  Check them out—there’s some great work there—and then go check out Wasabicube.  It’s elegant, lovely, and I love the current-page effect in the sidebar.  Now I want to redesign meyerweb again, except if I did it would be a ripoff of Peter’s design.  So I’d probably better refrain.

• Phil McCluskey has created an XFN spider and is making the results available at rubhub.com.  I’m not sure from whence the name comes, but the service it provides is pretty nifty.  Here’s meyerweb’s rubhub profile, by the way.
• Jonas Luster, who had some comments regarding the advantages of XFN’s decentralized nature, has created a bookmarklet (a.k.a. favelet) that checks the current page’s rubhub entry, assuming it has one.  Nifty!
• A Moveable Type template that lets you add XFN (and other relationship information, should you so choose) to a list of links.  This comes to us courtesy Keith Robinson.
• Autoxfn 1.0, a plugin for Bloxsom, brought to you by the fine folks at Sci-Fi Hi-Fi.

Can you feel the love?

While I was trawling personal sites. I kept seeing something I that I just don’t get.  There seems to be a small trend toward posting a link to one’s Amazon wish list.  What’s the goal?  Is it just a convenient way to say, “Here’s what I like”?  Do you assume, or hope, that a random passerby will decide to buy you something off of the list?  And wouldn’t it be kind of creepy if they did?  Somebody clue me in.  I mean, yeah, social networking is interesting and I’m all for the spread of information, but this seems like it might have crossed a line.  I only wish I could decide which one.

With that article still fresh in my mind, I received something like my fourth or fifth invitation to join LinkedIn, which was mentioned in the very next paragraph after the bit about XFN.  Since I’m rather interested in social networking technologies these days, I decided to set up an account and experiment a bit—do some compare-and-contrast between LinkedIn and XFN, from a user’s point of view.  It’s interesting, but I’m not sure I quite grasp the point of it.  Are links intended solely to deliver prospective clients to vendors?  Or is it supposed to be a way to show who you know, and thus who they know, and so on?  For myself, I’ve decided to limit my connections to people with whom I’ve had some contact professionally.  So if you’re a member and want to invite me, go ahead.

One of the people I did invite to link to me is George Nemeth, Cleveland-based superblogger extraordinaire.  I dropped by his site to see what he’s talking about, and spotted a link to a LEGO® recreation of M. C. Escher’s Relativity.  The same people also did Ascending and Descending, and a few others besides.  Color me impressed!  From there, I visited some other LEGO®-sculpture sites, finding at one point a really large model of a stegosaur, which was even more impressive, both from a sheer achievement point of view as well as a testament to the amount of free time some people have available.  And check this out: the guy who came up with a model of the Nebuchadnezzar, a mostly working badger, and a whole bunch of other LEGO® sculptures besides, lives right here in Cleveland.

Like how I came full circle with that one?

• Richard Tallent pointed out that XFN could be a key component of building trust networks between blogs.  He also had some gripes about the syntax and scope, which is fine, as we don’t envision XFN as being complete by any means and are very keen to see what people suggest.  My responses can be found in the comments section of his post.
• Leigh Dodds took me mildly and quite fairly to task for some minor inaccuracies in the XFN/FOAF comparison article I wrote, and also had some great observations and ideas regarding XFN.  Leigh’s comment that he finds XFN to be elegant was especially satisfying, because Matt, Tantek, and I worked hard to keep it that way.

One of the things I forgot to point out in my announcement yesterday is that not only can you add XFN values to your links, but you can do so and still have your HTML validate— see, for example, the validator report for the main page of meyerweb— because XFN uses an existing HTML attribute (rel) in a way that HTML itself allows.  In other words, XFN enhances the Web without breaking it, very much in the spirit of Tim’s original vision of interlocking technologies that worked together to create a social medium.  That’s an important aspect of XFN, and one I didn’t want to overlook.

Of course, XFN isn’t constrained to HTML.  Any XML language can also use XFN, given the right hooks are included in the language’s DTD.  Thus, we’ve created something that works today as well as tomorrow.

We’re still very interested in suggestions and constructive criticism, so keep those posts coming!