In the last few months, I have been thinking about what would such tools do and look like. I knew that they have to be driven by me - adding value to me and allowing me to add value, flexible and modular.

The first hint was in the white paper was about the sharing mechanism, a feeds-based VRM. Using feeds to share and distribute data - called FeedMe - has always been predicated on the existence of something like the Mine! - a structural element that allows individuals to bring together data they would like to a) have in their ‘domain’ b) manipulate and learn from and c) share with others as you see fit. A haven for data, a playground and a spring board for further online existence. The foundation for individual being the platform and for creating an ‘asset’ to be used in further interactions, relationships and transactions.. Thinking through some of the details and implications has taken longer as the Mine! incorporates the feeds based sharing as described here.

The aim is to equip individuals with tools to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge), arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) them according to their needs and preferences and share them on their own terms whilst connected and networked on the web.

The Mine! as VRM infrastructure v.1.0.

Also in pdf (although I recommend the linked version that will be edited and revised and edit as I go along).

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If you want care about Twitter, follow @biz or @ev. If you care about Rails, follow DHH here or here or here. If you care about Sun, read what the people at Sun say. Same for IBM or Microsoft.

The internet is about disintermediation, and about zero distance:

The Net is a giant zero. It puts everybody zero distance from everybody and everything else.

One of the things that underpins what I do is getting across to individuals and companies that they don’t need the media. They can put their side of the story out there and do their best so that people follow them and hopefully trust them. The internet levels the playing field, power law notwithstanding.

One of few things that unites bloggers is linking to others and to their sources. So for any opinion, rumour, news or guess, there should be linkage supporting that view (only rants are excused from this requirement). Even most media commentators - after years of bashing from the blogosphere - are now linking to sources of their stories.

So given that we can follow the source(s), not just be at the mercy of the journalist or the commentator, why don’t we?

If you care about the Big New Thing that’s going to change your life, wait till it comes and touches your life. Then you’ll know what it’s really about, not what some overworked underslept Bay-Area meme-promoter thinks.

Perhaps now that the internet has disintermediated media, we need to disintermediate our minds. We rely on aggregators, top 100 rankings, meme generators and promoters. Sayz Tim:

The other problem with the aggregators is that there are a lot of smart, hungry, imaginative people working really hard to game them and get noticed. Sometimes it works.

Yes, we need to manage the flow of information that is growing by the day. We need some way of filtering the bits that we are interested in from the noise. But aggregation is not the same as filtering. Our way of handling information still dates back to the era where authority and approved sources made it easier, if not better in terms of quality of information and complexity. I have mainly media in mind here. We used a range of sources, not unlike a radar scanning a designated area, to see if anything new came up. The effort was considerable but limited by the scope and number of sources. Once that got out of hand, we started to lose the battle to contain the information - we either keep scanning faster or throw hands in the air saying that there is just too much information.

The internet is a network, so why not use its nature for information handling. Instead of a delineating a radar field, we can build a spiderweb of sources that will ’shake’ the web and alerts me when there is something of interest. Our feedreaders could be constructed that way - the nodes in the web, sources that filter for us and the points in between insider sources that we might be occasionally interested when something happens in their sphere.

There has been a proliferation of tools that help me aggregate but there are still very few tools that help me filter. Part of the reason may be that the human mind is the best filter of all but, surely, there is room for tools that can help me to it easier and better.

Note: I covered this more visually here (about 6 minutes into the video).

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