Alexandre Passant has produced a really nifty exporter of SIOC and FOAF data from one's flickr account. Type in your flickr username, and it grabs the publicly available profile info (username, groups, etc.). It also produces some basic FOAF info for the people in your network, which is great for getting some more bits of info about people available on the semantic web.

It's great to see more SIOC data coming into being. I quite agree with Alexandre and John Breslin (Alexandre links to this from John) about the power of using SIOC data to help put together social information. The key thing is getting the online community information available for 'real' communities to learn more about each other. By 'real' community, I mean communities that are defined by acts of communication and sharing independent of the platforms through which that happens. Basically, I regularly communicate with a core group of people, a 'real' community, and I know that they have various online presences (twitter, blogs, flickr accounts, del.icio.us accounts, etc). Those online presences are parts of online communities. But tools typically still prioritize the online communities, rather than the 'real' communities. Thus, I can get an RSS or Atom feed from one's wordpress.com blog, and another from their flickr photostream, and another from their del.icio.us bookmarks, and I'll open up Twitter. But what I'd really like is to open up my browser and go to a page that tells me "Here's what my friends are up to in all of those spaces. Even better, it might suggest some other folks who are not yet part of my 'real' community, but based on interests, tags, common themes, maybe should be.

RSS has done a great job of fostering that so far, and will continue to do so in the future. But we're also at a point of needing something a bit beefier -- something designed to slice and dice content, rather than republish it -- and SIOC fits that very well. (See John Breslin's post linked to above, especially this image he produced.)

I'll end with shameless self-promotion, partly to force me to make good on producing what I'm promoting. I've been thinking along similar lines, and am getting fairly close to a little app to register blogs, flickr accounts, and del.icio.us accounts, then take the RSS or, preferably, Atom feeds and construct a graph of SIOC info from them. It's motivated mostly by the university-wide blogging we're doing here at University of Mary Washington, coupled with the degree to which we encourage students to use flickr and del.icio.us. That's a lot of content coming from a lot of feeds, and I think it needs some SIOC to push it into a knowledge resource beyond prolific republishing.

Watch here, it should be coming in the new year.

Update

I've slapped up a demo work-in-progress for the registration system I mentioned. It's not all there yet, but I for the curious rdf-folks out there, please take a peek here