From blog to DLA

Tom Coates wrote recently:

I'm beginning to think that the thing we have to do is start to reconsolidate and refactor the weblog concept itself. We need to take a step back for the first time in years and re-ask the question - what is it for? How do we find something hard and shiny in the middle of all these hybridised trends and make it the ideal shape to support all the other services that will grow upon and around it. In a whole range of issues - from the collation of our browsing to the handling of our photos, from the posting of our opinions to the way we're relating to our social networks - the traditional weblog format is starting to buckle. So rather than concentrating on the specifics of clashing informational streams in our feeds and looking to fix them, I'm going to make the problem even larger and ask - are these clashes evidence of something more seriously broken? Does anyone really have any idea what we do next?

The sense of strain in weblog-land is very obvious and I'm quite certain that Tom is on the ball in asking these questions. Today, via Marc Canter, I came across Barb Dybwad writing at geeked. in a post entitled, Thoughts on the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator:

I am still hooked on Marc Canter’s concept of the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator. Think of it as a local node that lets us have the best of both worlds: the awesome informative and communicative power of the distributed internet, and the centralization/aggregation of those bits of information created by, or most relevant to, an individual person.

So now I want my DLA to have both a front end and a back end - a public and private view. The public view will contains all of the data bits I want to be social:

• my bookmarks (an aggregate collection of del.icio.us, Furl, Spurl, and any future -url that may come into being)
• my public photos (an aggregate of my Flickr photos and… well, no other service is worth mentioning, really )
• my blogs (an aggregate of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, this blog, my business’s blog, my personal blog, all of my photoblogs, and all the future blogs…)
• posts I have made on other blogs (see sidebar on this blog for a woefully incomplete list of conversations)
• posts that I have made in message boards (trickier)
• some sort of aggregate of my media collection, media tastes and/or media recommendations (pull in last.fm, musicmobs.com, Netflix’s social component, All Consuming, when will the itunes Music Store get a comprehensive social component? etc.)
• public calendar, commentable. I want to broadcast where I’ll be, recommend events to others, and I want them to be able to recommend events to me.
• extra-blog conversation interface: my blogs are driven by my own posts, but I want a way for my friends/colleagues to be able to initiate messages and questions for me, as well: publically and privately. A sort of email/message board hybrid.
• An aggregate of my aggregates: syndicate my blogroll(s) for others to enjoy, and be able to leave local comments on. They can participate in any discussion on the external blog too, of course, but it would be cool to have the option to start up a more localized discussion on the post, as well.

Barb then goes on to detail what she would like to see on the private site of the DLA ('I want aggregated everything that is relevant to interacting with my digital life: a centralized dashboard of sorts') — read her list!

… all through the history of weblogs, the technologies have opened up new doors and created new problems. Different functionalities make it possible to do one thing much more easily or effectively, but they come with a smaller cost elsewhere. We're definitely moving in a positive direction, but each time we make a leap to a new level of functionality, things get more complicated and fractured and difficult for a while. Our feeds are ugly, and they don't quite work right and neither do our sites. But this is because the technologies that we're using to organise and collate our lives aren't quite communicating perfectly and aren't splicing themselves together in the way that we might like. And things are getting ever more complicated, and we need to do something about it. Tom Coates