[rdfweb-dev] partly anonymous web communities

[Julian Bond]

A slightly different view on this.

My guess is that the anonymous community is comparatively rare 
(invisiblog.com is an example). In most cases the desire is really for 
profile information to be hidden by default but for individuals to 
decide how much or how little information they expose.

The approach I use on Ecademy is to give the user switches for each 
piece of data with most of them off. eg
- Email address
- Home URL
- IM address
- Expose FOAF

So a user first has to expose FOAF. I use mbox_sha1sum always based on 
the verified email address they signed up with. I only show the email 
and URLs if they said yes. I only show foaf:knows for people in their 
network who have themselves agreed to expose FOAF. And I only show 
mbox_sha1sum for them. Finally, there's an optional field for people to 
point at their off site FOAF file.

This generates quite a large quantity of FOAF, but each piece of data is 
the result of a conscious (heh!) decision by the user to expose it.

For almost all communities I would have thought copying this is 
suitable. I would love to see this replicated in any community with 
sizeable quantities of mesh data about the links between members. Ryze, 
Friendster, LinkedIn, Livejournal all look like good possibilities.

The fun one would be Instant message contact lists, but that introduces 
a can of worms because any one person is unlikely to get permission from 
all their contact list to expose the data.

-- 
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
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