headermask image

header image

I want one place for all my content: Pipe dream?

I keep having this vision. I hope it will come about someday. There’s no way I’m the only person who’d want this. (UPDATE July 31: Nope, I’m not — Jack Vinson chimed in on this theme.)

The problem: Most of the content I’ve created does not live on my computer. It’s all over the web — my own blogs, comments to others’ blogs, my clients’ blogs, forums, e-mail lists, social media sites, media-sharing services, podcasts, wikis…. You get the picture. Consequently, I run the risk of “losing” much of the fruit of my hard work. In fact, that’s already happened. Sites or forums I contributed to years ago no longer exist. Blog comments don’t get indexed well by search engines and vanish into the ether.

Imagine this solution: A web-based service where I could archive all my content similar to Furl, only I could choose to make all or part of my archive public and shareable because it’s my content, not violating others’ copyright. Every piece of my content would get a unique, permanent URL, so I don’t have to worry if a site dies or changes. Any post I make to a forum or e-mail list would also get stored there (not the whole thread with others’ work, just my contribution).

And I could tag it all, share it selectively, generate feeds, and apply analysis tools to it. Plus incorporate whatever new cools tools come down the pike.

I want it. I want it bad. Do you, too? Does it already exist somewhere and I don’t know about it? Please comment below.

If you liked my post, feel free to subscribe to my rss feeds

Money Making Options

Post meta

This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on July 30, 2007 at 12:21 pm and filed under Arranging Ideas, tools, wish list. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Share with others

Post I want one place for all my content: Pipe dream? to digg. Post I want one place for all my content: Pipe dream? to Reddit add to stumbleupon Google Bookmark myweb bookmark on del.cio.us newsvine Tailrank magnolia Furl co.mments shadows simpy blinklist

9 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. Yeah! Great thing if I could have an internet page with all my stuff in it! I hope someone develops it soon!

    Reply

    1. Godsdragon on December 22nd, 2008 at 7:06 pm

  2. My bad. The extension is coComments and still is buggy as heck. So is there service. On my end, the co.mments is still not working right.

    The co.mments bookmarlette works but I still have issues with it. It is slow, the page doesn’t always refresh right and sometimes either the applette doesn’t apear or disappears so quickly that I don’t see it. Again this may be on my end caused by something else.

    Nonetheless, I don’t think one should have to even hit refresh OR wait regarding tracking conversations. The refresh issues are the same on two other machines I have and I run zero extensions on those machines.

    The co.mment bookmarklette also has another minor annoyance. I like to have a slew of tabs open at once. I use the favicon extension so that they take very little space. My Firefox automatically opens 7 pages each time I open it. When I open Firefox, I have to hit refresh on the co.mments page to see it anything hase changed. IMHO, they should have the page refresh automatically.

    Also, if I use the bookmarklette to start tracking a conversation and then click on the “click here” to check on things (in the applette that opens,) it opens a new tab. Again, I simply want more control than that.

    I am not trying to be a whiner here, I am sure that these things can be worked out. Anyhow, I am trying some of the services mentioned regarding this matter. I am sure I will have more to say on it.

    Reply

    4. Lumpy on August 4th, 2007 at 4:07 am

  3. Hey Lumpy, hope that tooth is healing up!

    You wrote: “I am not sure if I would term it “some progress’ regarding co.mmmets. At least on my end, the FF extension doesn’t work seamlessly and I must use manually get the conversation to track. (DISCLAIMER: I run many extensions or “add-ons” they can interfere with each other.)”

    OK, I just want to be sure — we’re taling about co.mments here, not Cocomment, which is a different tool, right? I’ve had problems with CoComment, and CoComment is what Scoble criticized recently, but so far co.mments is working ok for me.

    - Amy

    Reply

    5. Amy Gahran on August 1st, 2007 at 2:20 pm

  4. Oh, more tools for me to check up on, such a hardship…. :-)

    - Amy

    Reply

    6. Amy Gahran on August 1st, 2007 at 2:17 pm

  5. thanks again for the link love…

    I bet I will join in with Dr.Vinson (and you) on this… right now I am actually pretty medicated recovering from a tooth extraction that infected. Percoset is taking it’s toll. either my space bar is dorked or my thumbs are not working.

    I agree with you about content being lost. I think the issue is just as bad for what is out there and not actually lost but can not be found or tracked easily. Even if it is sitting in the Internet Archive or a cache somewhere, if it can not be found, it is just as practical as having been deleted.

    I am not sure if I would term it “some progress’ regarding co.mmmets. At least on my end, the FF extension doesn’t work seamlessly and I must use manually get the conversation to track. (DISCLAIMER: I run many extensions or “add-ons” they can interfere with each other.)

    My pipe dream is very much like yours… I want seamless integration. At present, I can track this conversation by using the bookmarklette but not the add-on. I have this post and Dr. Vinson’s with his comment box open in separate tabs. This one shows up. His does not. It is likely because I did not hit post on either but I tried the same routine this AM (actually yesterday morning now), after hitting post, I got the same results. Not what I desire.

    The bookmarklette will show the conversation but the add-on will not…. The only difference is my not yet posted comment. When I want to track a conversation, I do not care if I have posted. I want it to show up for me just as if I had commented even if I have not. Often listening to a conversation is just as important as participating.

    We have come a long way in what you aptly call the “connectivity era” but unfortunately we have also entered the era of “information overload” and “data smog”. What you term the problem is going to be a great challenge for those who create the “back end” of the web.

    Reply

    7. Lumpy on August 1st, 2007 at 3:51 am

  6. There is also http://www.Dandelife.com which also allows you to create an APML file based on your lifestream.

    Reply

    8. Chris Saad on August 1st, 2007 at 3:43 am

  7. Hi Amy – I like this post!

    This is very relevant and encouraging for us at Hanzo! We build web archiving tools for just this kind of need — to enable people to capture and preserve their web content.

    For example, for bloggers and individual publishers, we offer Hanzoweb, a free web archiving service. You can sign up at http://www.hanzoweb.com and archive all your content there. Hanzoweb provides a number of ways to trigger the archiving: manually with a bookmarklet, archive all that you blog about with our open source wordpress plug-in, drive the archiving programmatically via our open API, or pick stuff up automatically with our RSS archive tool. The latter is very handy, for example, you can archive your del.icio.us feed, or a specific tag in your feed, and we collect the bookmark and archive it for you.

    Just as you request, you can make your archived items public or private. All public items are shared. Indeed all our archives are stored in open, standard archive files, so to take sharing to the extreme, we donate our public archives to the Internet Archive, so they’ll be available through the Wayback too. So your content is not only shared, it will be very safe for a very long time indeed. All archived content has a unique URL composed of the name of the archive (Hanzoweb in this case), a timestamp, and the original live URL. We also generate feeds so you can share it that way.

    We don’t yet have analysis tools, but we do have an API, so let us know what’d be useful to you.

    If you have a large requirement, you can buy additional quota.

    We also do more sophisticated tools to enable institutions, publishers and corporations to archive their total web presence. More on that here… http://www.hanzoarchives.com

    Reply

    10. Mark Middleton on July 31st, 2007 at 12:31 pm

  8. Thanks, Tinu. From what I understand, integrating the blog comments, forum posts, and e-mail list contributions is what would be a real pain.

    I hear via Lumpy’s corner that co.mments has made some progress on the blog comments front. I’ll be checking that out.

    - Amy

    Reply

    13. amy on July 31st, 2007 at 10:06 am

  9. There isn’t anything quite like that yet. The closest you’d come would be tools like Page Flakes or Net Vine. Then there’s Facebook folding a lot of the social apps into one place, but it doesn’t do everything.

    I thought it would be neat to try and build a service that does something like this, but I just haven’t found the right programming team/developer yet. I really need to crawl into past emails and look at software partnerships I’ve formed in the past that weren’t ready to take off at the time.

    By the time I get mine together, there’s almost certain to be one. :)

    If I see anything, I’ll let you know.

    Reply

    14. Tinu on July 30th, 2007 at 11:40 pm

5 Trackbacks

  1. By contentious.com - Lijit search: Good start as a “me collector” on November 11, 2007 at 2:01 pm

    [...] the summer I wrote a post, I want one place for all my content: Pipe dream?, where I bemoaned the fact that since most of my work is distributed across various sites, forums, [...]

  2. By contentious.com - Community site shuts down; whither goes the content? on August 25, 2007 at 8:21 am

    [...] this experience seems like one more reason why a good “Me Collector” tool or service is [...]

  3. By Time out (please?) · No Straight Lines on July 31, 2007 at 8:15 pm

    [...] if that isn’t enough, a recent post by Jack Vinson – commenting on a post by Amy Gahran – now has me thinking of another issue raised by all this: How do I keep track of it all? [...]

  4. By Jack Vinson on the “me collector” at contentious.com on July 31, 2007 at 11:14 am

    [...] response to my post yesterday, I want one place for all my content, knowledge management guru and very cool guy Jack Vinson (who I finally got to meet at BlogHer) [...]

  5. By Knowledge Jolt with Jack on July 31, 2007 at 10:21 am

    The elusive Me Collector…

    Amy Gahran says, “I want one place for all my content: Pipe dream?” She mentioned this at BlogHer as well….

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*