B. Mann Consulting

I'm currently sitting at the Vancouver airport, waiting for a flight to Toronto and then on to the Dulles airport. I'll be spending the week there in meetings with clients in Sterling, VA. The days will be full, but I'm hoping to connect with some Drupal folks like Development Seed and the fabulous Earnest Berry, aka souvent22. Actually, I seem to recall that Thomas Vander Wal is over in Bethesda, which is pretty close as well. Perhaps a personal info cloud meetup on Wednesday night.

Now a mini rant on airport power. Djun and I were recalling the horror that is Heathrow (of which Tim Bray recently wrote). Here at YVR power is usually good, but we're at this weird Gate 50 - 52 area that has no outlets other than at the gate agent station. So we're plugged into the printer outlet :P I wanted to document this, and there is apparently the AirPower Wiki hosted as part of Jeff Sandquist's stuff. I'm sticky about things like that -- it needs to be at airportpower.org or some other top level domain, not hidden in someone's personal namespace. But I got up at 3:45am today, so please excuse any grumpiness. (and yes, I just registered http://airportpower.org and URL forwarded it to Jeff's wiki for now...)

Personal Info Cloud. That's the closest I can come to for what I'm thinking, and as I search a bit I see that PersonalInfoCloud.com is one of the faces of Thomas Vander Wal, perhaps best known for coining the term "folksonomy". We don't say that so much anymore, having devolved into tagging madness.

It seems to be that, even with the "aids" of RSS to more quickly skim through information, and tagging to perhaps help winnow through the particular areas we are interested in, we are reaching a kind of nexus point of signal to noise. I need my filters back. The information -- now in podcasting, photosharing, video blogging goodness in HD quality with surround sound -- is rolling towards us and we are being crushed. I probably shouldn't add something about spam (splogs, etc. etc.).

I had hoped that PubSub.com would be the foundation for something that could help solve this. In part, because its technology¹ was based on a real time infrastructure -- publish and subscribe -- instead of this polling and pinging mess we are faced with "regular" RSS. In my ideal world, PubSub's rich boolean search interface would be available, to easily create field-level searches trawling the entire web -- e.g. return all blog posts with the word "Drupal" in the <title> field. That's an incoming stream that could be vast indeed, but it's what PubSub did best: search the future.

And next is feedback. I would tag, or bookmark, or favourite or "Shift-S" for Google Reader fans, and stick it in my Personal Info Cloud. That could then become the basis for retrospective search aka what Google does really well right now, but filtered by my own sources of information. Ideally, I could expand my cloud to a Local region (geographically, my Placeblogger friends) or my trusted network (tie into the public sources exposed by my communities). I say communities rather than the simpler family, friends, colleagues, etc., because I want to stress that there are going to be more than one cloud connected in.

It's all overlapping networks of networks.

Sure, we've got bits and pieces around. Rollyo and Eurekster's Swicki are little bits of this, allowing people to create curated, pre-populated search collections based on domains. Even Wikipedia is getting in the game with Wikia / WikiSearch².

I keep tumbling a littler deeper into this rabbit hole. Lijit, on my list of "really must dig into this deeper", has a map your world page with...surprise! a picture of a Personal Info Cloud. That ties back into discussions with Ton Ziljstra at BarCamp Brussels.

And here I am, manually re-entering my little bits of identity into different services, looking for the Holy Grail. Perhaps convincing some friends that this time, maybe just this once, won't they also please sign up and enter their information into just one more system, 'cause then it'll be better for everyone.

So. Info Clouds. Personal, Local, Community. Search between communities, each member a pivot into another cloud. Maybe aggregating searches. I didn't really cover ratings and feedback loops, as well as the magic nature-vs-nurture algorithm that gives you a serendipity feed, that will always be magically full of things outside your echo chamber, and you can decide whether to let them in or "thumbs down" them away.

Welcome to 2007. I'm still excited by what's out there. Lots of day-to-day get-stuff-done work that needs to be done. But let's keep talking about and building the big stuff.