How Not To Blog ?

Why can't social networking sites bother to network with one-another? Are they that anti-social? As long as they don't they will never be much more than a novelty. To be truly useful they need to do more in the way of bringing together not only people but more of what people do with their lives. I'm not just talking tags, here.

Tribe, for example, allows you to view events, classifieds, groups, etc. But it doesn't really link any of that together. And that's one of the better sites out of many.

I can't think of a larger publicly-accessible database of people, places, and things than Google. However, its vast database is actually quite disparate and scatter-brained. It does not contain a single, reliable identifying method to link you with what you need to be linked to no matter how good you think it is at finding what you're looking for. Google still has to search through hell and high water for it.

A unique identification code for every event, person, place, and thing is the next logical step. It's where the future is headed and we might as well go there now. There's simply too much to keep track of to not have a unique way of identifying something you're related with.

Wikipedia is the perfect platform on which to bring everything under the sun together. It is already well on its way, with hundreds of thousands of user-submitted articles and bits of information. This could easily be extended to include, for example, the man sitting in the cafe, the cafe itself, the event he's waiting for in the cafe, and the book he's reading while he waits.

Every person, place, thing, and event would be assigned a unique ID (this can be automatically done for both new and current entries). One could then form or enable the formation of a relationship with anything in the database merely by copying and pasting the ID. Put it in your blog profile, mobile phone, an email, feed reader, or other field in your client. It will automatically know what it is because of its categorically-oriented ID, and how to organize it in your profile. You could even select the type of relationship you have with it ("relationship key") from a list of relationship types.

I could, for example, create an event in Wikipedia and then send its unique ID in an email or post it on my website. Others could then import that into whatever type of client they're using and know, immediately, everything about the event. Because of this unique type of information aggregation-by-ID they can know that the place where we're meeting has delicious French pastries and closes at 5PM on Saturday or that John, one of the attendees, owns the cafe and will give us a 20% discount (he also likes to play his classical music collection). If, later on, you wanted to aggregate all of that information into a blog post, Flickr, your PodCast, or ID-tag an email in Gmail all you would need to do is paste the ID. This has a tremendous immediate applications in schools and universities, not to mention everywhere the access of information is involved.

Google is great for searching. But wikipedia could be excellent for finding something specific, then using that information efficiently and dynamically in ways that we cannot now imagine.