Blog author info in FOAF format (esp. in Motion)

Hammersley's message was poorly-titled. That was about TypePad. Here's a Wayback Machine archive of the Guardian piece. Movable Type isn't hosted, you install it. (Back then, MT and TypePad were somewhat closely-related, but claims that TP is "hosted Movable Type" have never been entirely accurate.)

That said, there's nothing stopping anyone from creating a template that outputs the authors of a given blog in FOAF format.

Hi Su,

I figured that Hammersley was talking about TP, but I thought it might be in MT since that's what TP is built on. (I've seen that my wife's TP account provides her with a FOAF file.) Are you saying that it's not apart of the "kernel" but an add-on that the TP folks made to provide value to the hosted offering? If so, I strongly believe that MT needs to support this out of the box with Motion. This is what Motion is all about: connecting bloggers to their community from within their blogs, i.e., to allow bloggers to connect to their friends and their friends' friends regardless of where they are socializing on-line. Using Motion, MT users will be able to create communities around their blogs that tie together content and connections from all over the Internet. If those connections are machine-readable, the potential reach of that community will be greater. This is what FOAF is for.

I can only address the list e-mail at this point. Motion itself isn't a huge point of interest for me, really.

I'm not quite sure what you mean as far as FOAF support being in some shared "kernel," etc. Again, for some time now, MT and TP have been more like distant cousins than siblings. Something existing in one has no particular bearing on the other beyond maybe conceptual influence if it's received well. They're independent products.

As far as getting MT/Motion to support it, feature requests ideally go here. I can't say what the practicality of that is in the proposed release schedule, though.

I know nothing about the FOAF format, but if TypePad is exporting say, and Index Template in FOAF format, there is no reason you cannot add a similar Index Template into your MT install (Motion or otherwise).

After examining this page:

http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

It looks like to export a FOAF RDF file, you may need to add some Custom Fields, or just export a very basic FOAF file.

The Personal Metadata would be rather easy to automated, however I am not quite sure about gathering the Friend relationships. You could also get into the Group relationships as well.

I would not want to include a plain text email in a FOAF file, so you would have to have a script to do the SHA1 encoded emails.

Sounds like a good idea for a plugin for MT, but it would take some work, too much that I doubt you will see it in Motion.

Ken