So lets imagine I’m Leo LaPorte, Veronica Belmont, or even better Om Malik or Robert Scoble.

Let’s imagine that I wanna be a public figure, keep track of all the conversations, memes and tags I’m accumulating and keep them all in sync with my various social graphs I’m accumulating around the web.

I talked early about the notion of an Our Data server - something that would keep a copy of my public social graph around - so I could use it for inviting (I mean SWARMING) people into a new service, like we say happen with Plurk a couple of weeks ago.

The Our Data idea is baby step implementation of ‘Brad’s Thoughts on the Social Graph‘ a white paper treatise put up last summer by Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recorodon.   Now that Google is helping us discover our friends and MySpace has just announced the same and Microsoft is providing two-way APIs for us to access Live Contacts and we’re all waiting for the hammer to drop with Facebook and their notions of dynamic privacy - what’s NEXT?

Well let me propose the notion of a Personal Knowledge Base.

Call it a PKB, what have you, the idea here is that the collected set of tags, links, feeds, social graph, on-going and archived conversations, events, reviews, Groups and media and text postings all make up a knowledge base.  And it’s MY knowledge base.

So why not call it a personal knowledge base? [PKB]

We all know the term knowledge base from the world of knowledge management and we all think of knowledge bases as a particular set of info on a particular set of topic(s) or areas of interest.

So wouldn’t an individual have a whole bunch of personal knowledge bases - that (perhaps) are associated with a particular persona of their life.  So (for purposes of trying to keep all these ideas straight ) lets say that:

- each persona gets it’s own personal knowledge base

- and that each personal knowledge base - may in fact - be based on more than one topic, tag or area of interest.  And one persona could have MORE than one personal knowledge base - if you’re all over he map - like I am

Here’s  a map of 4 Marc Canter personae:

Each PKB has it’s own unique set of friends (social graph) media, on-going conversations, events, tags, groups, etc. - and has overlap with other PKBs and links to all sorts of services and accounts around the web.

We can break this all down in the social web and say:

- some people may wanna hear about MY PKBs, their FRIENDS PKBs, aggregate THEIR PKBs with others PKBs and in general keep track of, search and archive PKBs to their heart’s content - until the cows come home.

- shouldn’t I have a publishing platform to publish and archive my PKBs, participate in on-going conversations, aggregate photos and videos - based upon particular tags, associate events to places to particular sets of friends?

- and shouldn’t all these PKBs, storage locations, particular services I use, etc. - be distributed?  (i.e. NOT on one site and NOT locked up inside one database?

- isn’t the essence of ANY PKB to be distributed in today’s open mesh world?

Keeping track of everything on the web, wrapped inside the notion of PKBs may make things simpler.

- we can develop integrated ‘waystations’ , ‘dashboards’ , ‘aggregators’, what have you

- we can keep track of a distributed set of destinations and publishing end-points - all united by a brand= ME

- and we can inter-connect with any of our friends, collegaues, heros, villians, BigCos, powers that be

Just saying - PKBs may be a good way of thinking about things.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.