technologies
The foaf-a-matic web site you visited in exercise 6.3a suggests that you can post the
foaf.rdf code generated onto your website somewhere where it is publically
accessible. It says that if you do, then programs that utilise the foaf RDF may readily
access it.
As a post to your blog, labeled ‘Week 6 Social Graph’ discuss why you might or why
you might not make such a foaf file available to the world at large? Using readings
from this week and other items you may have researched for yourself about ‘Social
Graph’, discuss the pros and cons of this kind of personal data interlinking.
I have been using the internet now for over ten years and I am strongly against publishing any personal information on the web. I believe that people gain a false sense of security from the ever growing social networking websites and creating a FoaF file to try and encourage this behavior is extremely dangerous. Corporations such as Facebook and Google are geared towards making money not to help you gain more friends or become more popular. All the personal information that we put on the web is collected and filtered by algorithms developed by these companies that then filter what we can see. We are then targeted by custom advertising and manipulated by custom filtered search results that these companies think will appeal to us. As Eli Parsers mentions in his presentation Beware online "filter bubbles" | Video on TED.com. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bubbles.html. [Accessed 18 August 2011]. Google looks at 57 signals coming from your computer and uses them to custom filter search results. In my opinion creating a FoaF file is going to be just another piece of information that Google looks at to try and pigeon hole me into where it thinks I should fit in society.
Below is a diagrammed example of various companies creating a filter bubble taken from Eli Parsers presentation.
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