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Wake up, slacker!
In the FOAF Project home page, I suggested that RDFWeb/FOAF tools might constitute a 'platform for geeky fads'. This is a grave and ambitious claim to make without backing it up with at least some evidence.
From the earlier writeup...
FOAF Alarm Clock
A quick and frivolous example. Imagine you wanted to create
an computer-based alarm clock based on FOAF, where instead of
an alarm, your computer played sound samples of your friends
(and friends' friends) shouting "Wake Up, slacker...". FOAF
tools provide most of what you need, ie. tools that harvest
information from your friends' Web sites and aggregate it in
a local database. Except you need to know one more property
associated with people described in FOAF documents. You want
to know the URL of an audio clip (eg. MP3 or WAV) of their
"wake up" message. All you need to do to deploy your
FOAF-based alarm clock is to document the syntax for adding
this new piece of information into FOAF documents. Then
install a FOAF harvesting tool, write up some motivating
documents, and produce some demos or applications that make
interesting use of your FOAF extension. For this hypothetical
'FOAFAlarmClock' idea, this could be a program that
periodically harvested sound clips and used them in an
electronic alarm clock.
Example
Jim Ley was the first to deploy a foaf:wakeUpSlacker property. See his FOAF file for markup example, or download the audioclip.
This is no use without tools to consume it, so I wrote a quick Ruby script that prints out details of the sound clips in the harvested RDF database, and (on Unix systems with xaudio installed) plays the sound clip. See: foafalarm script. It's pretty simple, since it piggybacks off all the other infrastructure (harvested, parser, query engine etc.) needed for FOAF.
That's it really. If a few more people did this, we could build a goofy distributed alarm clock...
Dan, July 2002
Notes
If you've an application that uses this property (foaf:wakeUpSlacker) or ideas for extensions, scribble something here, or enter a link to documents etc elsewhere.
