Cool Tech

foaf:tipjar

Dan Brickley, the creator of FOAF has written up a quick blog entry proposing to add foaf:tipjar to the FAOF specification.

I'm a big fan of this proposal -- when I revamped my site and created this blog I setup my contribution box. But, I think the tipjar is a much better term for this, so I've started using this name on my page.

Of course I'd like to see a fancy solution that is completely machine readable, but the usual host of problems that prevents this from working well haven't been solved yet. (Authentication of the tipjar owner is the big one). Still no decent solutions on the horizon, but having the data on where to find the tipjar is an important starting point. The human planning to drop money into a tipjar will still need to make the final call and decide if this tipjar actually belongs to the person who claims to own it. Not optimal, but good enough to start with.

Now all we need to do is spread the tipjar meme.

Posted by Mayhem at February 25, 2004 11:57 AM