"The comment sphere" by Jeff Jarvis
Michael Sullivan
This is one of the better recent articles I have bookmarked on this issue.
This is the juice:
"I wish I could collect the crumbs I leave across the web: a review on Amazon, a photo on Flickr, a tag on Del.icio.us, a group-podcast soundbite at Schlaflos in Muenchen, a quote in a news story, a hotel rating at Trip Advisor, a forum posting most anywhere, a comment on a blog, an edit on a wiki, and interactivity yet to be invented. I wish I could bake that all together — every bit of it with permalinks and authorship — into a feed on my blog that can be organized in clever ways by topic and content type. I wish I could follow all those bits of conversation. And if I really want to get a headache, I want there to be more layers of conversation on top of all that. Oh, and it needs to be searchable. We'll figure out the ad opportunities later.
That is my aggregated identity. That is my tsotchketrail."