Last week, Dave Thomas posted about his use of a blog as a contact manager. His implementation entails 1 flat file per person stored in the file system, controlled by CVS, and is converted by RubLog plugin. This all seems great to me except for the use of yet another flat file format. If I were going to do such a thing, I'd be tempted to use either vCards (which are described in a pair of RFC's) or FOAF files. Either of the formats are plain text, which is important. They are also (supposedly) well defined enough so that there could be standard infrastructure (parsers, etc) for getting the useful information out of them. As I've related in an earlier post, vCards made it mostly trivial (once I found the right command in Outlook) to move my entire Outlook address book to the Mac OS X address book.

I'm ambivalent about vCard versus FOAF. For the purposes of interoperability with other clients, vCard is probably the better format. For the sake of everything being XML, FOAF as a slight advantage, since the xml-vcard effort seems stalled, as does the rdf-vcard effort.