David Beach is on a tear.  First he posts this awesome piece on calendars and how important they are and now he points me to this rocking track by the Godfathers - called Birth, School, Work, Death.

Truth be told I had this huge piece I tried to post yesterday on all this, and at that exact moment 365 Main went down and I lost the post.  Murphy’s Law.  I guess we really need to write that ‘backup on your local drive’ utility I’ve been dreaming about for years.

Anyway - so this guy David Beach works at Yahoo and has a coolio music download site called Swedelife (among other accomplishments.)  He’s one of those guys who’s been around and has his own vision - which he calls a ’digital life manager’ and he’s a Dad.

As many of you who know me - know - I’m an enthusiastic Dad with five kids - and dream of a ‘family aggregator’ which would sit on top of a DLA infrastructure.  Well David ain’t waiting and he’s speccing out what it’s gonna take for DLM (as he calls them) to happen.

You know I just LOVE THIS GUY!

In his post David says (rather eloquently I may add):

Two of the most important social developments in the past couple of years has been the explosion of blogging and the creation of Flickr. These events have sparked the imaginations of so many and have been the impetus for the Web 2.0 phenomenon. There are open and distributed social apps for nearly everything now. And many more are on the way. People are blogging, moblogging, podcasting, vlogging, link sharing, rating, reviewing, file sharing, asking, answering, and interacting in so many ways. There are now more means to express yourself and to conveniently reach an audience than at any point in our history. Yes it’s a lot of noise. But it’s your noise.

This poses a problem. If your blog is here and your photos are there and your video is over there and your email is down there, and so on and so forth, how do you keep track of it all? How do you effectively share it?  And most important how do you make meaning out of it all over time?

Now jump cut to Mary Hodder’s dabble.com.  BAM.  Hammer on the nail, slamming.

This soon to be released new service: “is a video bookmarking site, but we have some other features as well, for people to search, browse and ask for video and make playlists”

Basically it’s a video aggregator. It connects up with your video - wherever it is - anywhere on the web.  That then put syou in a great positon to do something with it.

Now back to Calendaring and 30Boxes.  Whether it’s time, photos, video, people or groups - all this stuff needs to be in an integrated, aggregated and highly customizable environment.  We’ve been able to build a business up around this mantra.

We help create and promulgate open standards which will help connect together the disprate islands of Web 2.0.  That’s our marketing.  And when I meet someone like David, I say RIGHT ON - keep stoking that fire!  We just kind of ‘open source’ these ideas, throwing them out there hoping that they find resonance and that folks actually go off and build their own version of a DLA.

So David calls them DLM. Coolio with me.  NetVibes has their own ideas, Start.com, Konfabulator, Portals, whatever.  Do labels matter?  I guess we could get into a meme on the difference between aggregation and managing.

I can safey say that Dave has single handedly convinced me to put calendaring back up on the Phase I list of DLA features.  Absolutely.  Clearly time is a built-in construct that you don’t need to educate people about.  Calendars are about as intuitive as it comes.

This reminds me of the first time I ever saw the Flickr Calendar.  The simplicity of the idea was stunning and defined a Web 2.0 moment for me.  Or when I heard about Chris Pirillo’s Gada.be. 

All of these accomplishments, great ideas and stand alone functionality islands are the cornerstones of our distributed, meshed together ‘archipelago’.  It’s the open standards that we develop which will mesh these islands together.

Same goes with on-line storage, media management and communications.  They’re all building blocks that should be able to be inter-changeable added into a DLA.  That’s what we’ve been building for the GoingOn Network - which should hopefully see the light of day - one of these days now.

It’s also what we advise our clients, spread to the wind and in general - live, breath, sleep, birth, school, work, have fun and eventually die - about.

So needless to say I’m looking forward to meeting David one day - perhaps even today - standing around the grilled chicken line at the Yahoo cafeteria.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 3rd, 2006 at 12:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.