There’s a perverse relationship between the software developer and the soapbox jerk software reviewer that needs little explanation. Developer wants publicity, thus he seeds his software amongst reviewers/bloggers/journalists and waits for the links to roll in. Developer gets free marketing, reviewer gets free software, audience gets free advice, everybody wins.

The FOAF (”Friend of a Friend”) project is a community driven effort to define an RDF vocabulary for expressing metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. Founded by Dan Brickley and Libby Miller, FOAF is an open community-lead initiative which is tackling head-on the wider Semantic Web goal of creating a machine processable web of data. Achieving this goal quickly requires a network-effect that will rapidly yield a mass of data. Network effects mean people. It seems a fairly safe bet that any early Semantic Web successes are going to be riding on the back of people-centric applications. Indeed, arguably everything interesting that we might want to describe on the Semantic Web was created by or involves people in some form or another. And FOAF is all about people.
[read the article on XML.com]

This document explains how the iTunes Music Store works. This information is useful to computer science researchers, cryptographers, and politicians, who may be curious to understand the largest deployed DRM system to date.

RSSJobs is a new service that helps you keep track of new postings on Monster.com. It is my understanding the Monster already provides a search agent that will e-mail you; but none of like giving out our e-mail addresses to big scary corporations any more, right? Post your resume’ ahead of the crowd with little help from RSS.

Over time, XML has permeated many niches. One area where XML is used increasingly is in the configuration of graphical user interfaces, especially in elements that are persistent but should not be fixed at compile-time. In this installment, David looks at the use of XML in Mac OS X’s Aqua GUI, and in the K Desktop Environment (KDE) which is either standard or available in most modern Linux distributions.
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