As put so well by Peter Merholz among others, xFolk is:
... a markup extension to allow tags to be created anywhere, not just through systems like del.icio.us.
You're It! ยป xFolk - technology for decentralized tagging
Just to be clear, the "tagging" he is talking about is when people bookmark things they find on the web under informal categories (tags). These tags can make that bookmark easier to find later and to quickly find related (similarly tagged) resources. Systems like del.icio.us enable the tagging (labeling) itself, and they let users share the tagged bookmarks among themselves. Tagging has proven to be quite popular, at least among a certain group. You might think of it as appealing to the same urge that causes people to become coin, art, or music collectors.
The point of xFolk is to make it possible to easily share your bookmarks outside of systems like del.icio.us. One important step in getting this vision to reality is to get services that enable tagging to use the xFolk format. BlogMarks.net (a social bookmarking tool originally signaled to me by Jonas Luster) has been kind enough to share template code that you can use with their blog sync feature to make xFolk formatted bookmarks from their service appear in your blog.
This code is the work of François Hodierne, one of the maintainers of blogmarks, and is provided on an "as is" basis. I have not been able to test it because my blog will not work with blogmark's blog sync (they are working on that) but am happy to collect reports on errors, fixes, successes, what have you in comments or trackbacks. Here's François' code:
{start_loop}
<div class="xfolkentry">>
<h3><a class="taggedlink" href="{mark_url}">{mark_title}</a></h3>
<p class="extended">{mark_description}</p>
<div class="meta">{mark_tags}</div>
</div>
{end_loop}
Examining this code, I believe there is one issue that needs to be fixed. Specifically, <div class="meta">{mark_tags}</div> does not require the class="meta" but does need rel="tag" in the links that are generated by mark_tags. Examining one of Jonas Luster's blogmarks posts to his site, mark_tags does not seem to produce rel="tag" by default.
Following Ryan King's and Tantek Çellik's leads, I am pushing for implementations that just make xFolk happen for users. Since xFolk is a back-end technology (i.e., a way of transmitting data for machine aggregation), I am working to get it produced as the output of already existing front-ends like blogmarks, scuttle, de.lirio.us, and even del.icio.us. François' email led me to believe he might well be willing to take the plunge with blogmark's front page.
My next steps are to create and submit patches for scuttle and de.lirio.us, two other bookmarking services. Steve Mallet of de.lirio.us also seemed intrigued by xFolk.
Technorati Tags: folksonomy, microformats, xFolk
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