SECOND OF ALL - I THINK BEFORE GOOGLE GETS THERE - MY COMPANY BROADBAND MECHANICS WILL - IN ADDITION TO OTHERS. YOU ALSO DIDN'T MENTION DRUPAL OR SOME SORT OF FRAMEWORK (MAYBE EVEN IBM'S NEW 'ECLIPSE' AS MIDDLEWARE) THAT PULLS ALL OF THIS TOGETHER AND PROVIDES COMMUNITY FEATURES.... COMMUNITY SITES ARE EXACTLY WHERE A BUNCH OF GEEKS - WORK TOGETHER - AND GET THIS ALL TO WORK - FOR PARTICULAR AFFINITY GROUPS, TARGETED VERTICALS AND LOCAL REGIONAL ACTIVISM.

- Data needs to be portable. If Flickr starts to suck, you should be able to easily move all of your photos to a better service.

DUDE - FLICKR AIN'T GONNA EVER SUCK. IT ROCKS.

- Redundancy and failing gracefully. What if Blogger is unavailable when I want to rebuild my Web site after my Flickr photostream has been updated (see my MTAmazon plug-in problem)? Does the rebuild just fail or is the data cached somewhere?

AMEN BROTHER - STABILITY IS WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT. THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN BY DEFAULT IT TAKES HARD WORK - WORK THAT SOMEBODY HAS TO PAY FOR.

- You need to get everyone to agree on interop/formats/etc. Fortunately, it seems like companies are a lot more willing to do this than 4-5 years ago (Amazon, Google, Flickr, Upcoming, & TypePad all have APIs or allow data output via RSS/Atom).

NOW LET'S SEE? WHAT THE HELL   HAVE I BEEN   DOING  LA TELY?

- Security. Lots of passwords and personal information will have to be passed around for all this to work. How about some commitment from these companies to keep this data as secure as they can?

HAVE YOU HEARD OF SXIP - YET? THE PIECES OF THE PUZZLE ARE COMING TOGETHER - RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR EYES!

This, then, is the promise of Web services. Nothing new, but it's nice to see things continue to head in this direction.

RIGHT ON TO JASON FOR WRITING THIS. MAJOR BOOKMARK TIME! I LOVE IT WHEN SMART PEOPLE DO THE WORK FOR ME.

Related reading:
- GooOS, the Google Operating System (kottke.org)
- Inventing the Future (Tim O'Reilly)
- T he Web as a Platform (John Battelle)
- Deepleap was an early attempt at some of this stuff (Lane Becker)

[Kottke.org]

mARC'S FINAL THANK YOU TO jASON.....

I love the way you put it and visionize DLAs. Now we just gotta do a version of that for huamns - and for mom's - who need to find playmates and baby sitters for the kids.

Oh yah - you didn't mention OpenListings - an economic engine for the blogosphere.

:-)

How to make money from Digital Lifestyle
Aggregators - Part I

I'm getting to be like Doc now.  I have multiple blog sources where I'm published at.

I've been starting to use Tony Perkin's AlwaysOn Network as a platform to spiel on about DLAs.  Strictly DLAs. 

A man's gotta have a professional avenue only to rant and rave in and the AlwaysOn Network is the perfect 24/7/365 venue for me - culminating with a meatspace confab in July.

I helped Tony put together the AO Zaibatsu (as he calls it) and I'm hoping that he'll continue to the good work in providing yet another example of social networking put into context - this time in the virtual Silicon Valley crowd.

The AO Zaibatsu provides every member a blog tool, which is then used to produce the global AlwaysOn Network voice.

Tony and his editorial staff (including Rafe Needleman and Rich Seidner) then cherry pick the posts and put them up onto the top page.  Tony and his team have some coolio new applications for Groups and sponsorships - which they'll be unveiling soon and it all ties into the AO Innovation Summit at Stanford in July 13-15th.

The whole brand is a great example of putting DLAs into action, and allows me (combined with 1UP.com) to show the world that "there's a there there".

So check out my latest post there entitled "H ow to make money from digital lfiestyle aggregators?"  'Cause it's all about making money - right?

I grabbed a couple of screen grabs just to show everyone that this is coming out of live code, with live, breathing humans attached to a real life social network - supporting FOAF and RSS - spewing out feeds and content faster than a NYC editor can edit them.

That means that the AlwaysOn Network is a permanent location in our people's mesh - a decentralized collection of on-line tools, services and applications - all utilizing FOAF to import/export digital ID's between systems.

We're working on forming an industry consortium dedicated to making sure that this happens.  It's code-named the FOAFnet.

Personal Life Recorders and Digital
Lifestyle Aggregators

Nick Graydos brings up a good point.

Once we have Personal Life Recorders (PLRs) - we'll need digital lifestyle aggregators (DLAs) to organize all the crap we collect.

Perhaps the biggest barriers to humans utilizing all the technology we offer them - is how to get all this stuff digitzed, uploaded, meta data attached and indexed - before we can utilize it.

PLRs solve that problem.

But we'll need ways of organizing, keeping track of and backing up all our stuff - especially as we move from home to work and school and bop around the world - as well. This all goes along well with the last post I did on dealing with your digital lifestyle - currently.

There are other things that require DLAs as well.

Activity based computing for one. Is it a coicidence that Don Norman influenced me on that one as well?

Clay Shirky calls it Situated software, but I see a more general era of technology - where the human no longer has to bend over to adapt to the weird rules and eccentricities of the software - to use it.

This assumes that the usability issue is finally understood, that soci al interfaces are predominant and that DLAs help us pull it all together.

The PLRs and activity based computing will take us to the next level.

Here's Nick's post which inspired this outburst.....

USA Today ran an article on MRAM (magentic ram) and its impact PLRs - personal life recorders.

The holy grail of devices = Storage Capacity + Battery Life + Device Speed / Responsiveness + Physical Size.

How do you feel about having your life recorded? I'm ready.

Marc Canter has some related ideas that tie into his themes of Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. I really think that Personal Lifestyle Recorders will require Digital Lifestyle Aggregators to sift through all of the data to find the interesting bits.

Imagine a next generation MyYahoo service – which enabled end-users to keep track of their personal (and their families) music, photo, video and file collections and provided them with ‘home publishing’ capabilities to create, store and distribute their own content.  Imagine a social networking environment which matched and found like-minded people and enabled them to participate in activities together (both on-line and in ‘real space’.)...

...Now imagine all of these capabilities and features in one integrated environment – focused in on a particular constituency, content brand or set of activities.  That’s what we call a digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA.)"

[Nick Graydos > thynk]

ELECTION NOTES: RNC mocks Kerry
lifestyle in online game

Barb Dybwad groks it: Thoughts on the
Digital Lifestyle Aggregator

Barb is the woman who writes the UnOfficial Apple Weblog.

She rocks...

2/2/2005

Thoughts on the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator

Filed under: web | metadata | digital communication | metaproductivity | technology wish list | remix culture | social software | futurism | flickr | signal vs. noise | media convergence — barb dybwad @ 5:12 am

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.

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. It would include things like:

• Interface to bank accounts, credit card accounts, other online bill payments
• interface to all memberships and subscription services: Netflix, iTunes Music Store, etc.
• Interface to my cell phone plans (I am on Sprint and Cingular now on two different phones): how many minutes I’ve used, how many remain, how many MMS/SMS messages I’ve sent on Cingular because they’re annoyingly stingy about that.
• Interface to Gmail and to pop mail accounts via webmail
• Interface to any online orders I’ve placed and their status (not processed, shipped, FedEx tracking #s, etc.)
• Interface to all 8 gazillion social networking services of which I am a member or ‘user’
• Drag and drop interface to post to Flickr
• Blog posting interface to all blogs
• Interface to my also imaginary AI bot agents who have been diligently scraping the web according to provided search terms and concepts (may as well shoot for the moon here, right? )
• A del.icio.us-style note-taking application that functions almost exactly the same way except: a) notes are not tied to URLs, they can just be freeform thoughts and b) each note has a public/private flag

I will undoubtedly think of more to add to this, so I’ll just keep building on this entry whenever the mood/inspiration strikes.

[geeked]

What can I say - Barb groks it.

:-)

Barb basically rapped out the spec to our product that we're working on. Go Barb go!

Prizes at Digital Lifestyle Expo include
Motion, iPod

"Harmon Leon went undercover to visit 3
venues of the ex-gay lifestyle around
San Francisco."

Jake Ludington's Digital Lifestyle -
Using the tools that make computing fun.

jakeludington.com/archives/000227.html
track this site | 3 links

Microsoft's Gates touts ''digital
lifestyle,'' despite technical bugs

Slate: Andrew Blum on "lifestyle center"
shopping malls

More incredibly, lifestyle centers do all the things that urban planners have promoted for years as ways of counteracting sprawl: squeeze more into less space, combine a mix of activities, and employ a fine-grained street grid to create a public realm—a "sidewalk ballet," in Jane Jacobs' alluring phrase. The irony is almost too perfect: Malls are now being designed to resemble the downtown commercial districts they replaced. What sweet vindication for urban sophisticates!

Not quite. Lifestyle centers are privately owned space, carefully insulated from the messiness of public life. Desert Ridge, for example, has a rigorous code of conduct, posted beneath its store directory. The list of forbidden activities includes "non-commercial expressive activity"—not to mention "excessive staring" and "taking photos, video or audio recording of any store, product, employee, customer or officer." "Photos of shopping party with shopping center décor, as a backdrop," however, are permitted.

Microsoft's Gates touts 'digital
lifestyle,' despite technical bugs?
(Updated 01:35 P.M.)

The Digital Lifestyle: Microsoft Puts
Power of Software into Consumer's Hands

SplashData’s SplashPhoto Wins Best
Lifestyle Application for Smartphones in
Handango Champion Awards

PCs for non-geeks

A couple of interesting links about the security problems faced by the vast majority of the home PC using public, who don't know how to install security updates (or even what they are) and don't have a corporate IT department to bail them out when they run in to problems. Joe Average User Is In Trouble is a column by a security expert bemoaning the scale of the problem. Do we all need a personal system administrator? is a call for advice from Steve Garrity for tips on minimising the support calls he gets from his parents, and includes an excellent response from Matt Haughey in the comments.

I've been called to a less-geeky friend's PC before to find it so infested with malware that it had slowed to a crawl. Most security breaches seem to come from Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, so Matt's advice to replace them with Firebird and Thunderbird seems like a particularly good idea. Placing PCs behind a hardware router is a great idea as well as it at least prevents nasty traffic from the internet from probing the computer - although as Adam Kalsey points out such a set up won't prevent malicious software that has already snuck its way on to a PC from calling home.

Six Geeks

We're All Geeks Now

Geeks and the Dijalog Lifestyle