RDF From LiveJournal

Typepad exports RSS 1.0, as well as FOAF. LiveJournal exports limited FOAF information because that’s really all I could squeeze out of it the first time around, when bandwidth and load time was a major concern. I wonder if with the possible buy out of LiveJournal by SixApart, some of the LiveJournal specific XML formats will change to RDF…

For example, the Latest Images from LiveJournal is an XML format… it might be interesting to see this as an RSS feed, especially RSS 1.0. Perhaps the creation of feeds for the LiveJournal photo gallery option…

I can see a lot of room to expand the semantic content that LiveJournal emits, and I wonder if Six Apart might be in the right place to do it. As far as I’ve seen, they’ve seemed interested in doing so with Typepad. Does anyone know if something similar runs through more of their work? I’d love to see more RDF coming out of LJ. It’s a large data source and so much of it goes untapped because getting anything into the development process is very difficult.

Mm, LiveJournal sized image annotation stores… advanced semantic web development at its finest. Now that’s something I’d love to see. Imagine being allowed to check which LiveJournal users were in a photo, and then having that data emitted as RDF… allowing searches over it, finding photos with more than a certain number of people, photos of places. Geolocation. The UI isn’t hard, it would just be a bit of hackwork to get it together.

If there’s one thing I hope for, it’s that this leads to quicker turnaround on LiveJournal development time. Whether it’s with volunteers or not, I’d be willing to double my annual cost if it meant I got to see new features within a year, rather than three. That kind of interface would bring such a boost to the semantic web…

Now I’m tempted to build an external tool myself, just to demo how cool it would be.

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