Dave Nolan

In my view, there’s a strong trend for people for people to consolidate their online presence, identity, and activity (a practice sometimes called “lifestreaming”).

Two needs crop up again and again. Personally, I want to be able to:

1. import and export information about me and my friends/contacts without having to type it all again
2. resuse and integrate what I do and say here with my blogs, lifestreams, twitterstreams etc.

In other words, break out of the “walled garden” of Facebook et. al. “Social network portability” is another way of putting it.

So rather than creating a toehold in this or that social network site (what’s hot today anyway Twitter? Plurk?? Identi.ca???) the key thing is to pick one that fits in to the emerging framework for social network portability (OAuth, OpenID etc.)

My tip is, then, that www.3s4.org.uk already helps you do that.

For example, FriendFeed is a website that lets you pull together activity from lots of other websites. If you check out my FriendFeed, you can see comments/posts I’ve made here posted there. (That and all the other detritus from my online existence!)

That’s because each Network member profile has an RSS feed so you can pipe it into other websites.

Any website or widget that accepts an RSS feed can show what happens here, there. If you try it, let us know!

Very interesting!

An interesting survey of ‘freeconomics’, the economics of giving stuff away for free, from Wired Magazine.

I had a few minutes so I mashed in popular del.icio.us tags for each of the sites you mentioned and reposted it on Grazr.

Using the del.icio.us API like this is one way to track memes. If I had more time I might have experimented with Reuters Calais.

The tags in the current list are quite generic because they are the tags for homepages, but imagine doing the same for a the latest posts.

Obviously there’s both a resource discovery and information sifting function to this.

Data! Yum.

From your second list:

• New fundraising channels; in particular text to donate to the 2004 tsunami fund, but also online donations in general (couldn’t find any figures, sorry)

I understand bootstrap to mean set up and grow an organisation without using large amounts of external help or going through traditional institutions.

For example, the Open Rights Group first raised income through PledgeBank, rather than applying to traditional external funds. Of course, one of the reasons that worked for them is that their natually supporter base is technically-literate.

We’re up and running.