Comments on: So much for the Semantic Web

By: as days pass by » Blog Archive » New photo gallery at LiveJournal

as days pass by » Blog Archive » New photo gallery at LiveJournal — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:06:47 +0000

[...] And then I had a brainwave. LiveJournal is built on free software, and it’s released and available. And they do photo hosting. After a bit of looking around, I established that yes, indeed, they do, the code is open source, and so off I went to LJ. And now I have my photo gallery online. Well done, Brad and LiveJournal. I said before, a long time ago, that if the Semantic Web works then it’ll work on LJ first; looks like running a public profitable service without hiding your source away is working first there too. [...]

By: Jon Hicks

Jon Hicks — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

As for ‘why emails?’ I ask for email addresses for the following reasons:

Not everyone has a URL, but they do have an email address
Taking an email address allows me to easily respond to any questions or topics that i want to respond to outside of the sites comments, or…
I can write and tell them that they are a bad person for writing such a beastly comment

I don’t see a problem with taking email addresses, as long as they aren’t shown on the site.

Shame you didn’t hear back from the Gravatars guy though…

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Jon: I do entirely take your point on being able to communicate outside the bounds of your own website. In practice, I don’t find myself doing that that much, mainly because I find that the majority of the conversations I have that are prompted by things I’ve posted ought to take place in public, because they’d be useful for other people to read. The few times I’ve thought that this doesn’t apply haven’t happened often enough to warrant asking any and every commenter for their email address. I’m not keen on the general perception, in this age of spam, that you have to bang your email address in everywhere in order to get anything done. The americans complain that their Social Security number works like that; you have to give it to everyone all the time, so that it acts like an unofficial identity number; the US government can’t declare that it is an identifying number, though, because the right wing will freak out about that. I’m worried that, on the net, email address is going the same way. This is why I thought that the sha1sum-from-your-FOAF-file idea was a good one. I may mail him again.

By: Matt Round

Matt Round — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Instead of Gravatars, have you considered Favatars?
Favicons might not be as pretty, but it’s a simple hack making use of existing data (I’m using a tweaked version of Paul James’ function for my weblog).

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Matt: I have considered them, but only since yesterday when I found out about them ;) I’ll be implementing them shortly.

By: Senji

Senji — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Of course, unlike the SSN email addresses are many–to–one (well, SSNs are but in general they aren’t supposed to be…)

I tend to sign most of my blog comments with my @livejournal address, but that’s by far my only available address.

By: Gary Fleming

Gary Fleming — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

I don’t know whether to feel smug about doing things the “right” way finally paying off, or depressed that what should be such a simple thing doesn’t work in the vast majority of cases.

When my home computer finally decides that it wants to work again, I’m planning on doing gravatars that fall back on favatars, with some caching thrown in. Can’t beat a good caching strategy.

By: sil

sil — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

Gary: you are great. Is it cold up there in that ivory tower? :-)

By: Ian Tindale

Ian Tindale — Thu, 01 Jan 1970 01:00:00 +0000

I’ve tried, but I don’t understand any of this.