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15 Aou 2004
Digital Lifestyle Aggregation
Marc Canter referred in one of his posts to a post on Jason Kottke weblog, who quoted Harold. I found some interesting things in this blog entries. Let me start with Harold’s quote:
I’m beginning to think that feeds (and content tagging) should be the starting point, not an offshoot. Until now, our tools have produced web pages then feeds. I’m thinking we need tools that create feeds and then let us combine them into web pages.
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I fully agree. I am starting to create all my websites as weblogs in some form or another with pMachine. Basically this implies that each webpage consists of multple entries (a weblog), which can be ordered in some way or another. This does not always have to a time-ordering as is usual in a standard weblog. I can chose another ordering as well. I decide however the order. These entries can be published as a feed, which I do create for most pages/logs. These feeds allow others to take my content and incorporate it in other webpages. Some of the feeds are static, i.e. content does not change, and other feeds change constantly as I add new content. These feeds are not really the source of my websites, but they could be theoretically. The pMachine system however allows me to mix multiple logs stored in a MySQL database and create a webpage from it. But whether this content is stored in a SQL-database or a RSS-feed does not really matter.
Jason Kottke adds to this that also other content, which you create with other sources should be mixed into your website. I agree. I would however like to make a distinction between content you create yourself and content created by others. Content created by others should be integrated into your website through a feed. For content created by yourself you should try to keep it in your own hand. pMachine gives the idea that any content could be published through that system. Each micro-content type could lead to its own feed with its own format, which is where the standardisation effort comes in. The content you produce should however be published with the same system, otherwise you are not able to manage it. The distributed storage solution suggested by Leo Kottke seems a bit to complex. However with good feed standardisation it could be possible.
Marc adds to that, that one is working on many components in order to achieve this goal. I get the impression that the emphasis lies on aggregator services. Keep all the content you create with a single reliable provider and publish your (micro-)content as a feed. If you want to be a part of a social network aggregator service, just hook up your micro-content feed to the service, but never give away your content. We need an environment where the creation of such hook-ups is easy.