Bill Kearney

Vouching for you?

Or consider that foaf:Group allows a site to offer up information about it's membership, if so desired. From this perspective you could, conceivably, have one service 'trust' another. That is, Syndic8's foaf service could be inquired of to see if the site is a known one. Likewise being able to state whether it knows the contact for that site.

The idea is that foaf isn't just for people alone, groups could use it as well.

And, as I'm sure everyone would likely inquire, anything offering up a foaf info would certainly do well to let it's users know what's going on.

For the solution to weblogs.com not doing it's own dirty work, it could always use the Syndic8 xml-rpc calls to see if there's a known RSS feed for that site's URL. Were other sites that possessed catalogs or directories of links to likewise start sharing them, either via web services or in a RESTful fashion, it might be a good start.

Does a remote site's statement count as vouching for you? That's up to the site asking the questions. If it finds the remote site doesn't give it reliable references then it's certainly welcome to cease using it. Couple enough of these references together, maybe not on every request, and you start building a weight. Enough 'points' and the URL's good enough to continue.

It's more of that 'semantic web' stuff some of us keep going on about. Maybe we've got a few things working right, in spite of what some folks would have you believe.