Jack Vinson talks about the elusive "me" collector - getting all our stuff into one place (he provides a nice list of aggregators). Anyone spending time online quickly scatters his/her digital identity across blog posts, wiki contributions, comments on blogs, etc. I must admit, I would like a central place for the "digital me". But, then I think of the problems. What happens if a centralized site goes down? What happens if a closed service like Facebook holds my digital identity and they decide to change their policies? Suddenly "me aggregated" doesn't seem so attractive - the temporary increased control gives way to a loss of freedom and increased reliance on a single service. Perhaps the best we can expect is to have a central ID (OpenID) and let our identity scatter across the web. After all, I don't apply the same metric of aggregation to my physical world (i.e. every conversation in one space).
Posted by gsiemens at July 31, 2007 4:32 PM | TrackBackMy "me" collector is Pageflakes where I collect all of the RSS feeds of the stuff I create. All it does is serve as a portfolio space...I don't actually create anything there.
Posted by: Will Richardson at August 1, 2007 6:25 PM