I read an interesting Gartner talk summary by Ross Dawson about the distributed social web, via another blog post by Chris Saad. Building blocks like OpenID, oAuth and microformats are mentioned in both posts, and I wanted to pipe up on behalf of the Semantic Web (if I may)…

A distributed social web is one of the ultimate goals of projects like FOAF and SIOC. Both FOAF and SIOC have recently been listed by Yahoo! SearchMonkey as recommended vocabularies (FOAF for personal profiles and social networks and SIOC for blogs, discussion forums and Q&A sites). Ross, if you like this topic, then you’ll probably love ideas like SMOB (Semantic Microblogging), where people can keep their microblog entries in their own space and then push them to as many Twitter-like aggregation services as they want. See my post on this here.

Also, here’s a slidedeck about SIOC for the uninitiated:

See also:

• Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #8 (the latest news from the world of SIOC)
• The web-wide social network (Chris Saad)
• Gartner on the distributed social web (Ross Dawson)