I was doing some research recently into a specific domain of web-publishing. After the rise of personal publishing tools that are commonly associated with Web 2.0 like weblogs, social networks, photo-sharing platforms, bookmarking platforms etc. a new breed of publishing tools emerges. Is it new I’m wondering or is just about crossing the chasm and – finally – finding proper ways to communicate what those (personal publishing) tools out there can achieve for you. I’m talking about those applications that serve one need:
- be it creating/telling/sharing [tag-ice]life stories[/tag-ice] or to support shared [tag-tec]story-telling[/tag-tec] along [tag-tec]a social network[/tag-tec]
Those services support:
- keep a diary
- create stories
- present yourself (profile)
- manage multimedia files
- eternal availability
- fine-grained access control
- connect with others (maintain networks via object-sharing)
- create groups of interest
- many file-formats at one place
Role model for that is: storyofmylife plus the foundation, that secures your access to the data entered over time forever (excellent idea since trust is the biggest obstacle for online services).
Story of My Life: “Story of My Life and its Foundation have an ambitious goal: to collect the life Story of every person who has walked the face of this earth – in the past, the present and our futures; and to keep these Stories preserved and accessible forever.”
A little different are places like dandelife and OurStory – explicitly dedicated to the sharing of life stories. They are set up to use personal events as some kind of social objects that can be linked, shared etc – presented in a timeline like style.
OurStory.com – Capture your stories, save them permanently.: “OurStory encourages deeper sharing and a collaborative process of online storytelling among family, friends and groups. OurStory provides a modern twist on the timeless tradition of telling, sharing and passing stories down through generations.”
What they all do very well is presenting those objects (stories, posts, files), make the accessible and shareable. But still there are things like Facebook, Plaxo, Peopleaggregator out there that can (could) do the same by offering just a place where you aggregate and package you widespread content.
Dandelife – “a social biography network” – has a different twist to that story. They understand themselves as a [tag-tec]mashup[/tag-tec] by connecting to existing services.
Dandelife.com : : “Lifecasting differs from blogging primarily in its contextual approach to organizing one’s publically accessible online content.”
Eachday does it nicely and a little differently by offering publishing options to services (though not implementd yet).
What the two latter apps try to do is to bring together social objects and people that created content at different places.
Do those application cross the chasm that separates early-adopters like me from the rest of the market? Will they encourage the majority of onliners to be creative and publish. We learned that roughly 10% of a community are creative in the traditional sense . Is that going to change? Will my sister now starts telling her stories for herself and/or other? Is the benefit of using that services already comprehensible. Is there enough individual benefit in it for the pragmatists and the conservatives.
Or are those tools a new metaphor of tools that support remixing of existing content publishing to differents places with different permissions etc. Well then I need them on my server 
– because a lot of (social and personal) data is created. And hence it is about opening the social graph or respectively omit the lock-in.
And just to mention it, isn’t that kind of web-service something that others call ePortfolio.
[tags]social networks[/tags] [tags]publishing[/tags] [tags]mashups[/tags]
Tags: mashups, publishing, social networks
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