This week’s issue of the excellent Digital Web Magazine leads with an article I’ve written about Distributed Social Networking, published under the title Portable Social Networking: Building Blocks of a Social Web

At BlogTalk back in March and again at BarCamp London 4 last week I did a session on the foundations of Distributed Social Networking; a simple guide through the basics of describing ourselves and social relationships with XFN and hCard and how they can be pulled together to do some first-step but useful things.

I’m not [...]

After a slightly longer drafting period than I’d planned, my article Kelkoo goes microformatic has gone live on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

It’s a lengthy piece on the recent redevelopment of Kelkoo and the microformats we added to it. It’s focused on the consumption of the formats though; putting them to use to build a [...]

Lately I’ve somewhat failed at blogging. Not in a colloquial meme ‘FAIL’ manner, in an actual if-you-put-me-in-a-competition-and-judged-me way. The lack of activity in both redesign and writing would have this site reclassified as a holding page for some other Ben Ward who would later poach the domain name from my idle mitts.

The advantage to being [...]

In my BarCamp round-up I commented on RDF getting a strong showing in presentations. It caught my eye and I came out feeling optimistic about the future of rich data on the web. Don’t misinterpret that sentence as RDF enthusiasm yet, though.

The thing about RDF is that no-one has yet demonstrated any real-world reason to [...]