Free Software Linux

The world of Web 2.0 consists of many sites that you might use for different purposes, you might use Flickr store your photos, Twitter to microblog, last.fm to find new music, your bookmarks on del.icio.us, maybe a blog of your own, the list could go on for quite some time. In each of these sites you might have a profile that tells part of the story about who you are, but these websites usually keep themselves to themselves, the profile will only reflect your interaction with that site. So different aspects of your Web 2.0 personality can be found scattered all over the Internet, but now it is possible to tie these strands together to enhance your website or blog and give a better impression of the things you find interesting.

A valid question here is why would you do this? One reason is content discovery. If someone has been reading your blog they might share some of the same interests as you, they might for example be very interested to see what you are bookmarking on del.icio.us as they might find the same resources useful. It might also enhance your reputation by representing you as a more rounded character than your blog suggests! As this is a new possibility the benefits might be hard to pin down just at the moment, but may become more apparent in the future.

There are various ways to create this aggregated view of your Web 2.0 view, one of these is to use the RSS feeds emitted by the various sites and aggregate them using Grazr which creates a handy widget which you can embed onto your blog or website. They offer a free basic account which can aggregate up to fifty feeds which should be enough. You will have to go through and find the addresses of all of the RSS feeds from all of the sites you are using though. If you don't fancy that you can use a service such as FriendFeed to produce a listing of your Web 2.0 activity, it also produces an RSS feed of this view. FriendFeed has the advantage that it knows about many different Web 2.0 sites and you mostly just have to tell it your username and it will do the rest, it does look a little basic though and it is not possible to change the look and feel of the site in accordance with your preferences. It can function as a microblogging service though and has an intriguing feature called "rooms" where members can post items that relate to a specific interest area. If you prefer something a little more glamorous but along the same lines you might like Secondbrain, now in its second beta release.

If you use Drupal there is another option which provides the same sort of features as FriendFeed but in your own site, the Activity Stream module (where can be downloaded from drupal.org). The description for this module says "Activity Stream builds a lifestream for you by aggregating your social activities all in one place", I must admit I rather like the term lifestream as it sums up neatly the result of tying all of the different strands of Web 2.0 activity together. I've had this module installed on this site for a while now and you can see what it produces by visiting the Activity Stream tab which shows feeds from several Web 2.0 sites that I use. Admittedly I've slightly hacked the module to make it fit into the site, I've increased the number of items it displays and changed the view for all users as I'm the only user on this site. However if you run a multi user site this can be a perfect solution as you only need install the module once for all of your users to benefit from it. They will then be able to provide the details of their various profiles by going just going into "My account". Each user profile page will than have their activity stream added to the bottom.

This might work realy well if you have a community site and would like to encourage your members to get to know one another, particularly if they get little opportunity to meet face to face. Such a lifestream might also help bring people together by, for example, encouraging them to follow each other on Twitter. The module supports several services out of the box, and it is possible to write small bits of code to make it easier to bring in other services. As an added bonus you can also use the RSS feed from a site it doesn't support, or even from another blog and import items from that.

I'm sure there will be many developments in this area, I've only mentioned a small number of options here. If you know of similar services then it would be great to hear from you.