The Real Deal About rel="me"
wiki.zegnat.net
wiki.zegnat.net
> If someone has the URI of that thing, what relationships to what other objects is it useful to know about?
In many ways, its really a question about the observer than the page; which means the pages seeking to answer it - even for their own special cases - will get the answer consistently, and often subtly, wrong.
The upshot is that pages will comply or optimise for particular observers- for financial or political reasons. This makes it very hard for observers not fitting the expected mould to make definitive use of the semantic web.
For example, a world in which distributed validation is not immediately politically or financially important (ours) is one in which such schemes as described in the article are faced with a huge problem of being consistently and often subtly broken.
User validation isn't something I'd like to be widely broken.
The issue however is that I suspect verification should also have the purpose of verifying that the individual/group doesn't just own a third party domain/resource, but that they're the owners of the version people associate with that name. All these systems make it very easy to just register say 'Microsofte' and end up with a verified account called 'Microsoft' or what not. That's going to allow for a lot of easy impersonation.
> just to specify a way to run web sign-in entirely from one's own site
and many in the community do not involve third parties. The rel=me thing through IndieAuth.com is merely a trick to get started quickly, by relying on existing identity providers.
Is the whole concept of authors publishing their opinions and thoughts on their personal websites dying, or is Google ranking such posts lower?
I know I have no interest fighting with SEO and I doubt many of the people who host their own small sites do either.
Google wants to know everything about me so they can serve me better (they claim), but a simple preference to exclude a website from my search results is not possible?
You can. Use "-site:pinterest.com -site:w3schools.com". To facilitate using it in every search, setup a keyword search so you can type "gsearch blah" and have the querystring automatically add those two filters. I agree there should be a way to add sites to a global blacklist in your user settings if you have a Google account. I'm sure Google has monetary reasons for not doing so though.
What do you mean by that, exactly? Is that browser-specific?
In Firefox you can right click most any search bar and "Add a Keyword for this Search".
It used to be that in Chrome it was that easy as well, but now you need to edit a bookmark and it's a bit more involved OR you can add a "Search Engine" and customize the keywords in about:preferences#search
In mainstream browsers at least, I believe it is implemented as an additional field to any bookmark. You change the URL to have "%s" where the search term should go in the URL and then you update the Keyword field of the bookmark.
So, for example, a Youtube bookmark would look like "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%s"
Then when you type the keyword and search, the %s gets replaced with your search phrase. You would need to hardcode the -site: bits to have it always added to your search. You can even create multiple bookmarks that filter out different sites if you want.
Personal Blocklist (by Google)
Blocks domains/hosts from appearing in your Google search results.
On the actual topic:
Rel="me" sounds bizzarely narrow, at the same time wildcard-ish and borderline narcissistic. Something like Rel="about:author" or Rel="author:blog" seems better to me.
Disclosure: not big on web semantics.
That article states that this is not the intent of rel="me" but rather: "The me link relationship can be seen as saying: the URL I am pointing to is about the same person as the page I am on." So it's not describing the author so much as noting that the two pages are about the same person.
I see the benefit of authenticating personal profiles and protecting people against account hijacking and fake accounts.
With "borderline narcissistic" I was referring to the fact that personal profiles are a giant part of the web nowadays (which is sad on some level) and creating even a special rel value for it felt like submitting to the current state of affairs.