I haven’t forgotten that I still owe you the last installment on the D2L competencies series, but that’s going to take more mental bandwidth than I have at the moment. My goal is to get to it this weekend.
In the meantime, I note this article on GigaOm about the DiSo Project, which aims to turn WordPress blogs into social network nodes using technologies such as OpenID and microformats. While I don’t think this is necessarily the Nirvana of social networking (if there even is such a thing), I would personally welcome it as a step in the right direction. First, it’s focusing on using open standards and a platform that isn’t owned by one giant vendor. Those are good things. Second, as a blogger, I would prefer to own my primary identity node rather than going out and copying personal information into 50 different social networking sites, none of which I feel any special affinity for. As one blogger quoted in the article puts it,
For me, there’s really no appeal in spending a lot of time creating ‘user-generated’ content via a social networking application. That’s like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.
The article does go on to talk about how some people will prefer “ephemeral” identities that they can use for specific purposes and throw them away, rather than the strong anchor that a blog-based node would provide. For me, it’s not an either/or thing. Both would be useful.