Too much information

I just finished setting up a plugin for this blog that displays my del.icio.us RSS feeds in the sidebar (to your right, and my left if I’m the webpage. hAR hAR). Now I’m thinking of doing the same for my Flickr accounts ‘photo stream’. I have accounts all over the place, most of which have RSS feeds (or will soon).

But why am I doing this?

Its because I’ve come to think on my blog as a sort of focus of my online identity. A central site which someone can see most of the things I do online. It presents a single face like a so called ‘Avatar’, or is it more like a Hydra, with many heads but one body.

It could also be a prof of identity. Zeldman once complained that someone had posted a snide comment on a popular blog and used his name, which caused a bit of a stink. If you only post comments via trackbacks and pingbacks then nobody can claim to be you who wasn’t.

So why not get rid of the blog all together?

Since nearly every portal/friend network/fanzine site you join now days offers you a blog, and all of these offer RSS feeds, why have your own blog at all? What you really want is some sort of interface to a feed aggregator that uses FOAF to store your list of feeds that are you. It would be even nicer if instead of setting up a new account with every site you want to post on, they would just ask you for a URL to a FOAF and suck all the info they needed off that.

Practicalities:

• Password might be a PGP public key stored in your FOAF file.
• You could have a instant messenger client for updating your FOAF file
• Entire forums of trackback posts might be setup. RSS feeds to topic/posts you make might then be automatically setup on your central site so you wouldn’t have to manually do that any more and you would always be informed about replys to you topics/post.

Conclusion

So it breaks down to FOAF out, RSS in and trackback/pingback as a sort of protacol for comunication. A web of entities instead of just websites. Now all we need is an interface to editting a FOAF and taking many RSS feeds and arranging on a page (like a ‘Planet’ I belive they call it now).

Note: It would be handy if RSS items had tags sent with them so that the feeds could be organised by some sort of metadata grouping.