A Marketing Tip for XFN

I was just tidying-up the sidebar on impoverishedNOOBS.com... when I had a thought.

Specifically, I was replacing the text links in the Meta Box for snazzy buttons, like these:

... when I came to the link to XFN, which WordPress has seen fit to put there for me.

It struck me that, though I had read a basic description of XFN when I first installed my blog, I had felt neither the cause nor the independent impulse to remind myself or explore further since. Now, I realize there are many possible reasons why that might be. But, whether rightly or whether wrongly, we have failed to connect as a customer and provider.

Today, upon my rediscovery of XFN's existence, I went over to their site -- meeting them more than half way -- and had a longer look at what they do. It's pretty damned cool. I also found this -- -- which lets some of the wind out of the sails of the letter I submitted to the XFN comment form...

"Dear Head Honcho -- you guys DESPERATELY need a button. Get with the program -- it's 50% discretionary participation and 50% personalized ornamentation. Put them out there -- make it "reflect what you do" -- I bet your activity will triple -- Cheers,

Jack Mardack
president,
profitLABINC.com"

Okay, so they have a button --

But, I would dare to suggest that my point retains some validity. The truth of the matter is, we're just getting started -- there is much to be encouraged by, and there is also what our experiences as mature businesspeople reminds us could happen. Numbers still count... there's certainly going to be "Strength in.."

We've seen the better idea, even the good idea, lose in the past, to the -- shall we say -- more popular choice -- -- 2 cents.

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XFN: Introduction and Examples The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect — to help people work together — and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. --- Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web Introduction XFN puts a human face on linking. As more people have come online and begun to form social networks, services such as Technorati and Feedster have arisen in an attempt to show how the various nodes are connected. Such services are useful for discovering the mechanical connections between nodes, but they do not uncover the human relationships between the people responsible for the nodes. XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs. In sufficiently modern browsers, authors using XFN can easily style all links of a particular type; thus, friends could be boldfaced, co-workers italicized, and so on. It is also the hope of the authors that this practice becomes widespread enough to allow the creation of a service that charts personal (as opposed to purely mechanical) links between weblogs and the people responsible for them.

2HP

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