This place is getting more like Gattaca every day. I was doing some thinking in the car this week - I've been in the car a lot this week - about
FOAF profiles and the whole Six Degrees of Separation thing, and I wondered if in the not too distant future, we might be supplementing our resumes and c.v.'s with social profiles giving details of the layers and the strengths of our social and professional network connections, affording would-be employers the chance to overlay and match our network profiles against their model candidate network profile like a relationship or social form of psychometric testing. (I wonder what having RageBoy in your social network would throw up in such a test?...)
Social Networking, a discreet pastime in itself for some, surely must be more complex than simply being about collecting basic vanilla connections and relationships. From casually flitting about networking sites the other day, I found comments from professional social networkers such as "My mission is to meet 1,500 people this year, last year I only met 1,200" and this seems like a very clinical approach where the only important measure is the number of people you add to your network and not what you add to it. For some it's evidently just a numbers game, but surely it must be less linear than this?
Google uses their PageRank method to sort and order links so that the more hyperlinks that point to a specific site, the higher the rank value of that site and the closer to the top it floats in Google's search indexes.
Put this into the context of social networking and FOAF, and I suspect that before long we'll be ranking individuals and their connections in this way too, by calculating their social value in terms of the number of people they 'know' and weighting their links accordingly or, more interestingly, by attibuting a value to the life contribution they make in other ways, e.g. applying a value multiplier if you've written a book or a software program or some other kind of social contribution or identifier like race, linguistic skills, parenting skills or information that may be put to more sinister uses; your biological make-up or your genetic profile.
On that last point, I suppose that if we're completely serious about our social networking - pure social networking - then there's no point in having someone in your social network who's going to die young from heart disease through lack of exercise or smoking habit, after all what use would they be to us in the long run?
Increasingly I get a sense that the early murmurs and machinations of the Semantic Web are creeping progressively over our world and infesting it like some form of nano-technology-esque meta sludge, gradually and imperceptibly pushing us to revaluate and logically re-organise every aspect of our lives in preparation for the day when we are entirely depicted and rendered in a database somewhere or indeed, everywhere on the Web.
on their blog sidebars or somewhere in easy mouse reach, thus enabling their readers to beat a hasty retreat should their nefarious office surfing habits be compromised by an approaching colleage or manager. Of course if nobody takes it up then their readers will just have to get caught and fired, or something nasty like that, so this will only work if you do the right thing by your readers and put yourself in the role of a blog equivalent of a health and safety at work officer. If you follow. There are instructions for equipping weblogs with Fire Escapes, dead easy actually.