Thoughts on Aggregation
Disclaimer: I've grown up a bit and learned a lot since this blog was started. In the beginning I took tips from the likes of John Chow and Shoemoney and tried to write titles and content for Digg and Reddit. In the end it didn't do me much good and most of it just seems silly looking back. If you're interested anyway, here's what I wrote back then, but take it with a grain of salt.
I don’t remember how I came across the concept, but recently I discovered the tumblog, and I was intrigued by the concept. There are plenty of services will host a tumblog for you, with Tumblr being the most notable in my mind, but none of them provide the aggregation and organization that I’m looking for.
I’m a social application addict. I have a Flickr
account, I share video to YouTube, I’m
LinkedIn, I use
Ma.gnolia,
Facebook, and I’ve toyed around with
Twitter and MySpace.
In short, there’s too much of my content scattered about the web and I don’t see the need to manually re-create (or aggregate) it
somewhere other than my own blog. I want the meta-information to go with the content. I want to know that a link was shared
from Google Reader, or that I can grab the
geo-tag information from my carefully organized Flickr photos. I can see a huge benefit to using the content where it lies
and not necessarily pulling it all together and locking myself into a meta-social-aplication (sorry Tumblr.)
In short, I want the power to aggregate the content the way I see fit.
To organize the content on this site, I think I want two things. First, the ability to generate full-fleged articles, with graphical banners, summaries, and the whole nine-yards, preferably called out into a separate section so people interested in my content get gain easy access to it through RSS. Second, a tumblog, similar in a way to Dan Cederholm’s Notebook (I love the little icons on the left), with a carefully aggregated mash-up of Flickr, Google Reader, Ma.gnolia, Twitter, and YouTube. I also want the ability to share quotes, although that’s not too high on my list since my social graph is not really geeky enough to enhance the content of this site and gossip and politics are not really my target content.
How am I going to do it? I’m not sure yet, MarsEdit’s AppleScript functionality and Automator may be helpful, but I’m not sure if it’s automated enough for my taste. I could probably right a shell script and cron-job it on my Dreamhost account, but that may be too automated. I want minimal work but maximum override, I guess I just need to think about it.