[rdfweb-dev] proposal: trusted circle of foafs

[Urs Gehrig]

dear list

edd dumbill asked me to post my proposal on "trusted foafs" to this
list. so here i am. after having discussed the potential of foaf 
with a friend yesterday, i came to the decision to make an entry on
my blog. excuse me, if i tell something, that is common
knowledge, since i have not followed that list earlier, nor am i
using foaf for month ;)

regards, urs

--
http://circle.ch

so here is my proposal, as jotted down and not yet 
perfectly detailed:

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http://www.circle.ch/blog/p912.html
[Weblog] -  urs - urs at circle.ch @ 17:54:31

Proposal - Postback: posting into others blogs

Idea:
After having had a discussion with Bernhard [1] yesterday, I came 
to the conclusion today, that one needs a third way of posting; 
let's call it "postback".

Just a few minuts ago I found Bill Kearney's idea [2] which leads, 
as far as I can tell, into the same direction. But his proposal 
had, as written in January 2003, still a problem to solve. How 
can one build trusted circles of people? The answer must be FOAF [3].

Getting blogged:
I need to be able to define a group of trusted people in FOAF 
to be able to post directly into one or any permitted category 
of my personal blog. Since the foaf.rdf is sitting on my host, 
I will have the possibility to manage and administrate it; the 
control is by the blogger him- or herself. PGP would be a good 
start to support trusted circles.

Blogging to many:
On the other hand, the blog interface needs to get a list of 
trusted FOAFs, which I can select as an equivalent to the 
Carboncopy in an E-Mail tool. They might accept my post in 
realtime or at least merging the post into their blogs after 
a process of approval. So maybe we need a kind of a 
ring-ring-knocking-at-the-door method. The post could contain 
the same elements as the trackback [4] or pingback [5] uses 
it. it is to discuss, if only an excerpt of the post or the 
whole post is to send.

Specifications of Postback:


    - FOAF based trusted friends
    - PGP key to secure authentication
    - parameters such as:
    * title, The title of the entry
    * entry, An excerpt or the full entry
    * url, The permalink of the original authors blog entry for the entry
    * blogname, The name of the blog in which the entry is posted.
    * author, The original authors name or nick
    * datetime, The entry posting datetime stamp
    * key, A PGP key of the author
    * foaf, The foaf.rdf location (might make "key" obsolete )
    - An URL that hosts the pingback.php file, waiting for posts to come
    - ...


Any comments on that?

[1] http://www.bernhardseefeld.ch
[2] http://www.ideaspace.net/users/wkearney/archives/entries/000052.html
[3] http://rdfweb.org/foaf/
[4] http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mttrackback.html
[5] http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback