I’ve been searching for the Holy Grail of social media crossposting – a Facebook status that is a tweet announcing a blog post auto-generated from del.icio.us links – and here is one:

I will not use twitter, tumblr or my facebook news feed to announce a new blog post.

Who’s with me?

[EDIT] I also vow to keep twitter and Facebook statues separate. (Thanks Si, although that’s a harder one).

The reason is that I don’t want to contibute to the “background noise” I describe here.

With people barely having a thought we don’t in some way publish to the interweb there’s continuous chatter about information overload. I’ve always been of the opinion that I’d rather have all the information there was, leaving it up to me to pick what I wanted and what to ignore. It’s this that leads me to never ever getting my feed reader down to less than 2000+ unread items (most of these are flickr photos tagged “cat” or various vanity searches for my projects).

So, given that the background noise is of my own making, why would I complain about too much information?

Well I’m not complaining as such, I just think there needs to be a solution to the problem of getting the same information twice from different places. A technical one may do, but I’d rather a sort of moral code.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, with people pushing their blog posts through their tumblr or twitter accounts, or into their Facebook posted items – this is information that I want, but I’ve subscribed to the blog I’ll find it there. It would be fine if the sources were just different ways of receiving the same content, but there’s other unique stuff mixed in - I like my contacts personal tweets, or their randomly tumbl’d web content, so I get the blog posts again. You end up skim reading everything, so I’m sure I miss things I’d like to have known.

I signed up for FriendFeed this week, more to claim my online identity there that through any desire to use it at the moment, but is it just another way to push the same content? ReadWriteWeb listed 35  ways to stream your life, albeit that some of them are rather hazy, I’m just thinking that I’d rather cherry pick what I care about from different people.

bounder’s soup. Soup.io seems to be tumblr with more friend aggregation facilities. All well and good - the bonus feature for those of us that have very many blogs is that you can of course be logged into your tumblr account and your soup account at the same time - leaving two quick bookmark-based microblogging platforms available.

There have been a number of times since I started my tumblr account that I wanted another for a specific purpose, now if I can only remember what they were…

Sign up, but please don’t just use it to push your blog feed, flickr pics etc through automatically.

Via

I’ve just finished altering the front page of our kitten blog site, The Kitten Channel. It’s always aggregated Flickr pics and YouTube vids tagged kitten, but where it used to also try for Zooomr pics and Google video it now pulls in blog posts and sites (Technorati and delicious respectively). This was because I felt that Google video and Zooomr weren’t updated often enough to provide our patented* “river of kittens”.

The front page now uses roughly the same code as the from page of upyerBrum, with Magpie RSS to pull and cache the feeds.

*Not really

I’ve had this idea for a while, but want to get it down on ‘paper’ so people might be able to take the idea and sort it out. I could probably hack together the software side myself (not quickly, it’s a big job), but there’s a huge need for hardware and legal back-up to get it to work properly which I don’t have.

It combines three technologies, but aims to solve the problem of knowing how to be good. In short “should I buy this product”, “how does it sit with my values”. For example you may decide that you don’t want to buy any products from Heinz (as I don’t), but Heinz are a large company - it’s not always obvious in the supermarket which company ultimately owns which brand. Or despite the labeling, how can you really work out the food miles in some products?

In this system you can use your mobile phone to scan the barcode (already possible on the Nokia N95, but you could write an image processing app for most camera phones that are coming out onto the market now) and a small application on the phone interfaces with a website to give you the information as to whether the product sits in your ‘ethical space’.

You would have to sign up to the site and set ‘ethical sliders’ showing your views on different issues (animal welfare, economics, food miles, fair trade, local issues) and also your home area (for calculating some distance based ethics). You could then get a personalised yay or nay on each product you were unsure about.

Two potential problems here - collecting and updating all the information, which would hopefully be solved by using a very tight database and allowing users to add information on each product (if a barcode wasn’t in the database , you’d get some sort of message asking you to help populate the information). Luckily I think that a lot of this information is already collected by campaigners and if it was easy enough to add to the database on the site it could be filled up quite quickly. The other main problem is the litigious nature of major corporations, this product would have to have some very good PR and legal back-up, and be prepared for a long fight.

The project could self-finance in a number of ways, for a start there would be a wealth of accurate and self-entered data on shopping requirement that could be used for research (and sold perhaps, once de-personalised - the ethics research itself could act as a pressure on retailers and suppliers), the site woudl also be able to offer very tightly focused advertising online (even on the phone app itself, IN the supermarket, offering an alternative product that did fit in with the ethical map of the user).

It’s a social web-app, a wiki-database- and mobile technology. It’s very clever I think, technologically possible now and broadly speaking very 2.0. It just needs a cool name.

up yer Brum is my latest project, the idea originally was simply a sort of ‘Brum Blogs’ aggregator, but it’s got a lot more complicated. The front page shows items on the web (technorati, dell.icio.us, flickr, youtube )tagged ‘upyerbrum’ - as well as the most popular links already submitted - and lets people vote on them or submit them to the ‘digg’ part of the site.

It uses Pligg, an open source digg clone, Magpie RSS as well as some nice php and css that I’ve got to grips with specially for this project. I really hope that it’ll take off, although the ‘launch’ is making me a bit nervous - I think it’s the thing that I’ve invested most time in for ages.

Try it, carefully now…

up yer Brum :: promoting the best of Birmingham on the web