FOAFING THE MUSIC -- Faq

faq

frequently asked questions

General

Q: What is this?

A: This is a music recommender system, based on user's profile. This means that, depending on what you like, what you listen to, where you live, etc, you get personalized music recommendations.

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Q: What do you offer to me?

A: Based on your user profile and the information that it contains, the system recommends you:
* Artists similars to the ones you like
* New music releases
* MP3-blogs to download music
* Podcast sessions to stream/download
* Automatic creation of playlists based on (only!) audio similarity
* Incoming concerts near to where you live!

You can see all this information once you login to the system. You just have to sign up for it (and you can delete your account whenever you want to!).

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Q: How does this work?

A: foafing the music makes use of information available on other websites to recommend you musical assets. It uses the vocabulary created in the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project to define user preferences. The FOAF project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.

To recommend you musical assets, foafing the music makes use of information available on other websites, such as:

Livejournal is a personal publishing ("blogging") tool that stores user's information in a FOAF document.
From this site, the system reads your FOAF profile (in case you do not have one).

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player.
From this site, the system gets noticed of music that you recently played.

WebJay is a tool that helps you to listen to and publish web playlists.
From this site, the system reads your playlists.

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Q: How much does this cost?

A: Well, right now it is free. So, what are you waiting for? Go and create an account, now that you can! :-)

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My Profile

Q: I do not have a FOAF profile, but I would like to create mine. How can I do it?

A: You can use FOAF-a-matic to create your FOAF profile, kindly made by Leigh Dodds.
Please, note that there's no box to fill your interests! You'll have to do that by hand later on.

Or you can create an account to livejournal or to Blogger

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Q: I have a livejournal account but foafing the music cannot read it properly. Why?

A: Did you type in any interest in your LiveJournal user profile?

The process is as follows: Login to livejournal.com => Manage => Info => Fill interests box => Save Changes

You can see how your livejournal FOAF profile looks like at this URL: http://www.livejournal.com/users/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/data/foaf
You should have some <foaf:interest> there.

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Q: I have a FOAF profile, but this crap site cannot read it. Why?

A: First, check that your FOAF profile is correct.
You can use an RDF Validator to check it.

Assuming that your FOAF profile is correct, then you should have some interests in your profile (if you want to use foafing the music).
The system reads the dc:title attribute from your interests, or in case no dc:title is given, it gets the <title> of the resource. All these options should work:

(1)

<foaf:interest dc:title="The Dogs d'Amour" rdf:resource="http://www.tylaandthedogsdamour.com/"/>

(2)
```
 <foaf:interest>
   <foaf:Document dc:title="The Dogs d'Amour" rdf:about="http://www.tylaandthedogsdamour.com/" />
 </foaf:interest>
```
(3)
```
 <foaf:interest>
   <foaf:Document rdf:about="http://www.tylaandthedogsdamour.com/">
     <dc:title>The Dogs d'Amour</dc:title>
     <foaf:topic rdf:resource="http://dmoz.org/Arts/Music/Styles/Rock/"/>
   </foaf:Document>
 </foaf:interest>
```
(4): No dc:title given. It gets the text of the <title>, from the rdf:about page:
```
 <foaf:interest>
   <foaf:Document rdf:about="http://www.tylaandthedogsdamour.com/" />
 </foaf:interest>
```
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Q: I do not have a geographic location in my FOAF profile. How can I add it?

A: You have to add the geo: namespace at the header of your FOAF profile, and then set the lattitude and longitude of your location.

You can use this application to get your location, given your address (optional), city and country
```
<rdf:RDF
xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#"
xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"
xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#">
...
  <foaf:based_near geo:lat="41.40" geo:long="2.17" />
...
</rdf:RDF>
```
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Privacy

Q: I hate spam. Are you going to spam me?

A: No. We hate spam too. We do not even ask you to enter your email into the system.

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Q: Do you share my personal information with others?

A: No. Just because we do not have (i.e you do not type in) any personal information!
But the system collects some information about you. All we ask is your username (if you have one) of three websites (audioscrobbler, webjay and eventually livejournal) where the system will grab some music related information from there.

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Web Browsers

Q: Is this website working with all the browsers available?

A: Hmmm...well, we are afraid not! But at least, we tested it with the following ones:

Firefox >= 1.0.3

Netscape >= 7.1

Opera 8.0

Safari

Konqueror (>= 3.3.2)

Lynx (really! you can try it :-)

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Q: Oy! where is IExplore, then?

A: (Un)fortunately, IExplore is not working very well... (although you can use it).
The reason? We're making use of some (basic) capabilities of CSS 2.0, and it seems that IExplore is complaining a bit!
As a simple example, compare how this FAQ looks like in IExplore with the rest of the browsers...

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To FOAF or not to FOAF?

Q: What is the meaning of Foafing the music?

A: To Foaf the music.

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Q: What is the meaning of FOAF, then?

A: Quoted from http://www.maltmadness.com/mm08.html :

"The term FOAF stands for 'Friend Of A Friend', but the connotation is to find an usual or rare malt at a very good price, preferably an old, dusty forgotten bottle that still has its' original price tag on it from years ago.
(For the origination of this term please see Dr. Entropy's excellent website article on this topic at http://www.smwhisky.com/foafing.htm)"

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