Posted February 13th, 2008, in: Semantic Web| Technology

Some steps I’m taking to get all my contacts in order:

• Syncing my phone with my Desktop Address Book using iSync.  (Unfortunately, my phone, a Nokia 6126 isn’t supported by iSync so I had to find a hack to make it work)
• Installing Plaxo‘s extension for AddressBook on my computer so I can take advantage of Plaxo’s syncing service
• Setting up Plaxo to retrieve as much info about the people I know as possible from the various online services on which we are connected.
• Manually attempting to find redundancies in this master-list of connections and fix them.  I have multiple incomplete address cards for many people, often with each one containing different pieces of the puzzle.  Also, I wanto to include MySpace URL’s and Blogs that aren’t discoverable using Plaxo or any of the other tools I have at my disposal. I guess I have to do this more or less manually.
• Re-Syncing with Plaxo then Re-Syncing with my phone.
• With a few exceptions, I’m not going to include people who I’ve only met online thru Social Networks Etc.
• Publishing this data, Minus Private information like emails addresses and phone numbers in Semantic Formats like FOAF, XFN Etc.  I wonder about how other people would fee about the ethics of this.  I’ve decided that since I’m not revealing anything that isn’t already findable on the public web, via a MySpace search etc, it isn’t unethical even though many of the people I know might haven’t thought through what the implications are of participating in the Social Web.  I am going to take special care to not reveal blog sites and other things that people I know are doing anonymously.
• This will probably take me a few days at least and I’m not looking forward to the work.