Are you aware of any open web work / uses / examples on/of the social graph? If so let me know!
The social graph is often a useful discovery tool for instance, and can be a navigation aid online. If you’ve ever looked at the blogroll of a blogger you follow, to find other bloggers to follow in your feed reader, you know what it’s like.
I’m interested in localised, fragmentary, starting from you/me, types of social graphs, out on the open web. I’m aware of some academic work in the early ’00s exploring and visualising the social graph of cross-blog conversations, and of course there used to be FOAF but mostly without interesting examples of usage attempts.
One thing that might be interesting is making RSS feed lists and blog rolls traversable. E.g. I have a blogroll that includes Peter who also publishes his blogroll. Both those blogrolls are in OPML, and OPML allows inclusion of external material formatted in OPML. I can include Peter’s OPML list in my OPML list. Then from my blogroll you are able to browse Peter’s blogroll. Or use a reader that actually includes it directly from its source. If Peter included my blogroll that way, and others that people publish than one could traverse across multiple includes. Etc.
@ton just noticed in your article you refer to techpledge, the link seems kind of dead to me. But I’m interested in what it was and if there’s anything similar and relevant. Do you know of anything? Thnx
@remcoboerma You’re right. Odd. Will remove the dead link. Seems it went offline late Feb this year. Here’s the last archived version https://web.archive.org/web/20220219135632/https://www.techpledge.org/
Take the Pledge
@ton thanks for the link. Too bad it’s down.
@ton just to get it right, are you looking for examples like the blogger researching other bloggers? Or the graphic representation of networks like that?
@remcoboerma as an example, yes. FB has their data representation of the social graph as fundament underneath their business. I wonder about building one’s own social graph, starting from yourself on the open web. Which is why bloggers are a logical example. I blog, follow others who also follow others who follow others and me etc. Now there’s no easy way to navigate that let alone automatically. The fediverse is interesting too, less for the micro actions (likes, boosts) more for the follows.
@ton in that case flickr.com groups has been used like that. Join a group, scout the member’s photo’s for quality and follow those you like.
@ton At educationwarehouse we’re trying to do something similar with our network of best practises for the educational sector. For example, someone from the Leiden community might see something interesting on https://onderwijsindeleidseregio.nl . Pratices listed there have stickers for networks (for example) the visitor can click, and learn about other practices from that community. On the roadmap is way to tell more about those networks so people will join.
Onderwijs in de Leidse regio
@remcoboerma yes, like that but then to do it automatically and to create a network map (as data, not as visual) of those connections
We’ve been using the social graph in addition to profile tags/keywords in order to provide “ethical” Friend Suggestions; and I believe this usage is spelled out in the project GDPR. We also allow you to hide the visibility of your connections (such as provided by your ActivityPub followers and following collections) if you are concerned.