Library clips

A while back I wrote on how the blogosphere manifests distributed networks, these are people that have each other on their blogrolls/Reading Lists, read, comment and link to each others blogs. Each blogger has a slightly different view of this implicit network, just like you have different connections in a social network.
See a recent post on Lasagna and chips - unexpected combinations for creativity and innovation: The new shape of online community…this is a typical example of a distributed blog network.

To make this type of network explicit you would have to get all these people to join the same network eg. MyBlogLog (blogs), FeedEachOther (RSS Readers), Ziki (Lifestreams). I’ve posted in the past and recently on how much benefit we could get out of blogs we read and interact with if we were directly connected in a social network.

But this isn’t possible, it’s very hard on the open web to get people to use the same product, whereas in the enterprise you may have no choice.

Not sure what the answer is but recently there are a few posts going round suggesting the blogosphere as the ideal open social network.

It is mentioned that a social network isn’t quite your own space and identity as your open source blog, a social network being referred to a place you rent as opposed to your own house.

This movement is gaining momentum with the DiSo project.

Also see the differences and similarities DiSo has with BuddyPress (seems like a distributed version of Ning using WordPressMU).

I understand the OpenID and oAuth stuff, blogrolls, and widgets are very open and work on all blogs, but how can I add another blogger as a friend besides just placing them on my blogroll or subscribing them to my RSS Reader.

My wish a while back was using MyBlogLog in a distributed way, ie. being registered with this service as a blog network, but not having to visit the site. Instead using widgets on your blog to be able to add friends, message friends, see friend updates, etc…just like the Recent Readers widget (see the section heading “What I want” in the post).
In essence my blog would be my profile page with lots of network sidebar widgets, compared to Facebook being my profile page.

My blog would have widgets:
- private message
- comment wall
- friends
- presence (status)
- recent readers
- poke
- friend request

Someone visiting my blog could send a friend request.
Once they are accepted, they could poke me from the widget on their own blog, this poke would appear on the widget in my blog.
Friends could message me from the widget on their blog, and I would receive it on the widget on my blog (all secure of course).

In fact regular visitors to my blog wouldn’t be able to read the comment wall or see my friends status, etc…as they are not yet part of my network. The widget would not show content for these people…this makes it a bit hard for my network as when they visit my blog they would have to login to see the widget content.

But really they don’t need to visit my blog, if I’m added as their contact they can see my lastest posts, status, etc… from the friends widget on their own blog.

This could extend to Newsfeed widgets, notification widget, and so on, pretty much a distributed Facebook type of network centred around blogs as your profile.

Maybe some of these more admin widgets like Notification, and Friend Requests would be in the admin section of my blog and not as a widget on the blog itself.

So we all still need to join a service like MyBlogLog, but this is only the glue, our space to interact and our profile is on our blog, this makes it very open to use.

Now if Wordpress and other blog platforms became their own MyBlogLog somehow, then this would mean we get to fully own all our data, everyone’s data doesn’t live in a central place…just like our blog content data not living in a central place.

This would be a truly distributed social network, there would be no central site to visit that is owned by a company, it’s totally open and decentralised.

This is what the blogosphere is already like, it’s just that we aren’t quite explicitly connected yet.

More

I think the idea is too start with Wordpress as it is popular and Open Source-TypePad is now also Open Source-and move on to other blog platforms, appling an OpenSocial type of principle. In the end if your blog platform is built to the open standard, you will be able to connect to the distributed blogosphere network.

What would be cool is to write a blog post and tag people in your network, or write a comment on someone’s blog post and tag people in your network.

Often I have left comments on a blog and want to let some of my friends know that I have left this comment. Problem is I can’t trackback a friend’s “about page” from a blog comment box…see my posts on this point.

Valdis Krebs left a comment on Anne’s post saying:

“Back to blogging? yes!

DiSo will allow separate self-hosted Wordpress installations to talk to each other in new and cool ways. Sort of like how anyone can e-mail anyone else. Email apps can send Email to other e-mail apps. Not just Yahoo mail to Yahoo mail or only Hotmail to Hotmail. They reason email works across email apps is because they all use the same standards. Now expand the idead beyond email, trackbacks, friending, blogrolls, think of and think of all the Facebook applications that are out there. That will be possible with OAuth+OpenID+hcard+XOXO+XFN=DiSo.
December 12th, 2007
10:50 AM PT”