There are people on the web I’ve found durably interesting to listen to. How do I keep track of what they’re saying? Spyonit offers a way to track changes on pages of interest. But how about knowing about their contributions on other sites too? Dave Winer exposes on his site most of his external postings, but other people won’t necessarily put everything in one convenient place.
Obviously information is not yet structured depending on who writes it. Yet, I’m more interested knowing who’s speaking/writing, than who’s publishing/distributing. Information sources at Moreover are still listed the old way, by publisher rather than by the actual source (the guy who wrote the stuff). I guess that’s some more supposedly undoable XML wizardry. Since we’re starting to bypass content middlemen as we know them today, we might as well put people forward. How do I do this with writers I like?
04/17/01 update: What’s a sociate? “‘Sociate’ is a word I invented (in a conversation with Charles Warren) that echoes what I like to do — associate people and ideas — and what I believe most about the Net: that it’s a social medium.” says Jerry Michalski, an investor in Pyra and a user of TheBrain.
It’s interesting to see TheBrain used to link people instead of just web sites. This all make sense if you look at the different topics Michalski wrote on.
03/03/04 update: now more and more people publish RSS or Atom feeds, so that’s less of a problem. For tracking those who still don’t, since Spyonit seems dead, there’s Trackle.
08/10/09 update: there was FriendFeed, and there there wasn’t. A walled garden Facebook can’t allow distributed, open competition like that thrive.