Alcides Fonseca

After the RSS feeds being restored, I took the chance to add some new stuff to my online identity. I use this URL as an endpoint to all my online activity. My hCard information is here, my XFN friend list is here, the links to all my profiles in several online services/social networks are here. It even works as my OpenId.

For the past days, I’ve been checking up on FOAF. There is already one opensource social network accepting this format to import all your information. There is a bit of discussion between XFN+hCard versus FOAF since the two of them represent your personal information and the relationship you have with others. I believe more in the microformat way of displaying data, but FOAF follows RDF standards.While Dan Brickey, one of the authors of FOAF, believes there is space for the both of them, I still have my doubts… Either way, I did my own FOAF file with basic info and then linking to the FOAF files extracted from my last.fm, twitter and flickr profiles. If you want to make yours, you can write by hand or you could use FOAF-O-Matic. For wordpress users, there is already one plugin.

If you are interesting in learning about RDFa (a formal way of defining everything! in semantic web) and a bit about FOAF, make sure you see this simple video.

Next, I decided to implement my own APML file from all the tags I use in my blog. The result is already linked in my head tag and I am waiting to use it in some projects. Imagine filtering through your feeds based on what you post (that is probably what you like!). Yes, there is also a wordpress plugin for this too. And then I just adapted the code to serve as a tag cloud in the sidebar. But the evening hacking wasn’t finished until I add the last delicious entry for each tag page.

I hope in less than 6 months I have a daily usage of this stuff I’m working on. It would be a shame if when I register in a website it doesn’t import all my public info :(

I’ve posted a while ago about APML, a format that stores the attention you give something. Today I’ll show you how to get your own personalizes music magazine thanks to this format.

I assume that you have a last.fm account like I do or a Pandora account, If no, get one, scrobble around a little and come back then.

Thanks to tastebroker, a project by Paul Lamere of Sun Microsystems, you can export your music attention data into a APML file. If you use last.fm, it will be located at http://TasteBroker.org/apml/last.fm/YOURUSERNAME and if you use Pandora it will be at http://TasteBroker.org/apml/pandora/YOURUSERNAME. You will need your APLM url later. In tastebroker you can also get your APML for you del.icio.us account, but it won’t be useful here unless you only bookmark music-related stuff.

Finally enter Idiomag.com, a daily music magazine that focus on the music YOU like. Just write you APML URL in the input field, and click GO. Have fun with the mag that you will like for sure!

Note: If you get a "Oops" error message, try the following URL: http://research.sun.com:8080/AttentionProfile/apml/music/YOURLASTFMUSERNAME. It worked for me!

Web2.0 has brought a great amount of data and people have the need to gather the ones that matter for them in order to consume. For now, you can have all the info in netvibes (or other widget system), you can have them all in your RSS reader (since all the information cames up in RSS nowadays), but it is a pain for those who have a lot of interests to catch-up with everything happening on the web. People came up with a lot of complex GTD ideas to make it possible. As for me, I just read blogs through Google Reader and for all the rest (twitter, photos, videos…) I use Flock, which is a great social browser.

There is now a format that joins all this information with a level of interest for you. It’s called APML and it stands for Attention Profiling Mark-up Language, that work as a OPML not only for feeds, but also for other data and gives them a attention value for tags. It’s the Web2.0 Folksonomy in its best shape!

But of course all this standards don’t mean a thing if there aren’t uses for them. You can check some examples of APML usage as I did. One of the tools that interested me was Particls, one cool sidebar that shows content that is relevant for me (you can set it up by using tags and adding your own feeds). It also orders news by the interest they have to you. It’s definitely a anti-GTD application, but might be useful for you if you are a journalist or you activity needs you to be in constant track of some themes.