[foaf-dev] [foaf-protocols] fp:ping

[Story Henry]

On 15 Apr 2010, at 15:20, Kingsley Idehen wrote:

> Toby Inkster wrote:
>> On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:09:46 +0100
>> Story Henry <henry.story at bblfish.net> wrote:
>> 
>>  
>>> It seems unnecessarily complex. 
>>> It uses RPC, when a simple HTML FORM can do. Why? RPC was cool 8
>>> years ago because it used XML!  Wow! The continuation of this lead to
>>> the SOAP bubble, which seems to have vanished in the past year
>>> somehow.
>>>    
>> 
>> You get the benefit of compatibility with the large installed base that
>> Pingback has, and you get to reuse existing Pingback libraries and
>> testing tools.

> Toby,
> 
> I think SPAM killed pingback uptake a long time ago. I really don't believe its widely used these day.

I think it is quite widely used by bloggers to notify google and other search engines
or aggregators when they post a new update... I can certainly see that if you automatically
accept all pings, then you open yourself up to spam. The pings need to be filtered.

Anyway, here is the spec

  http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback

So having read it again I think it has a lot of good things:

 - the X-Pingback header is a good for photos, that cannot contain links
 - the link relation in the html
 
I think the only thing I am really against is the use of the xml/rpc. Perhaps I can 
convince the semantic ping back people to enhance the ping back service to enable 
application/x-www-form-urlencoded results. I think that with that, and allowing that
the ping back service be foaf+ssl enabled, one could get something interesting.

> In a sense, a FOAF+SSL enhanced pingback mechanism is what we could use to achieve the following:
> 
> 1. Yet another FOAF+SSL utility showcase
> 2. Resurrect a potential viral system that is current quite dormant.

Yes, the clever thing about this restful ping mechanism is that - apart from being
so simple that it feels like some people may die of a heart attack hearing of it -
is that we can know the identity of the pinger, by placing the form behind a foaf+ssl access
control layer. I don't think this completely deals with SPAM - you can't deal with SPAM if 
you want to be open to novel interactions, but it does 

> 
> This plus WebFinger will accelerate our journey towards FOAF+SSL usage critical
> mass based on fixing broken Web 2.0 items :-)

Ok, I'll rewrite my suggestion to the pingback people and the linkeddata list.

Henry


> 
> -- 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Kingsley Idehen	      President & CEO OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
> Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
> Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen 
> 
> 
> 
>