Or DLAs, as Marc Canter calls them. I got an email from Marc on Tuesday giving me some details on Tribe.net's new 'container beta'. In Marc's words: "...So the time has come when Tribe.net has finally gotten its next generation act together. Tomorrow they're putting out a beta release of their new profile page, which now acts like a DLA because you can plug in any sort of external module. They're starting off with:   -          Amazon Wish Lists -          De.licio.us accounts -          External Blog feeds -          In fact ANY RSS feed -          But they'll be more later -          And they still have their Tribecast blog module – which is being worked on – ...

Apparently what's going on is The GoingOn Network, child of Tony Perkins, Marc Canter, and others. Marc says this is gonna be the first true DLA (Digital Lifestyle Aggregator — backstory). The idea is a meta-network in which all of your subnetworks are inter-connected, so you can share things like profile data and microcontent across the larger network, and network operators can split revenues from ads and web services. Ideally, they're aiming for complete interoperability with existing services like Friendster, Tribe, et al — which would be some trick, and incredibly useful. The plan is to support all of the content standards including microformats as well as all major identity systems (SXIP, OpenID, XRI/XDI, Microsoft Meta Identity, etc.) so that all the bits can speak with each other natively. It's based on Drupal and will offer a completely customizable environment and templating systems for self-publishers. Color me very curious. Hopefully we'll get some sneak ...

Six Apart has an entirely new blogging platform in the works, slated to be unveiled in 2006 — Project Comet aims to simplify the process of blog creation and bring blogging into the mainstream. Project Comet integrates rich media as well as text, allowing you to bring in streams of various media (photos, music, voice, video) reportedly by drag and drop — something I'm dying to see. Combining the power of TypePad with the community aspect of LiveJournal, Project Comet also includes fine-grained permissions controls over public objects — the press release doesn't detail the specifics of this, but it seems to include privacy controls for at least family and friends. My curiosity is piqued by the community aggregation feature, which brings together the latest posts from your near and distant family to create a "shared experience that can transcend location and time." The gist of the tool sounds like it's incredibly easy to syndicate and aggregate content from multiple sources — ...

Firstly, here's the thought trail: via Phil Wilson via Leigh Dodds via Louche Cannon comes the idea of being able to subscribe (ideally in one click or simple set of steps) to a feed that contains a person's total output. This would be an aggregate of all of their blogs, their social bookmarks, their listening profile (Audioscrobbler, e.g.), their photos, reading lists, wish lists, etc. — whatever grand conglomeration of output is available in RSS format. My reaction is three-fold: 1) Yes, I want to subscribe to people's brains, please. 2) Yes, I want to provide my own "RSS brain" — one feed to rule them all. 3) This sounds an awful lot like a DLA. I had a chance last month to play with the new Tribe profiles (aka "containers") — Marc Canter has got a good example of what it's all about. Its modular architecture allows you to bring in content from other sources via RSS (as well as Tribe-centric content) and rearrange as desired. The end result could easily be a page of all ...

I got a ping from Danny Wen of Iridesco about their new product, SuperGlu, which is essentially a DLA-style aggregation of a number of your already existing distributed services like del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, last.fm, etc., plus your blog(s) and anything else with an RSS feed, really. You submit your username for each supported service or paste in an RSS feed to your sources list, choose a template and voila — you've got a nicely prepared mashup of things you've blogged, stored, photographed, listened to, etc., arranged in reverse chronological order. I lurve it. Could I replicate the same thing on any of my own blogs? Sure — but it would take a while and then I'd have to assume maintenance of it. Setting up SuprGlu took all of 3 minutes, exists as its own subdomain here, and I don't have to worry about it any further. It's just a simple aggregate of my distributed self. Of course I want an RSS feed from it, but that's in the works. Oh, and in case you're wondering — is ...