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The Artful Manager

Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture

Aggregating the distributed life

December 15, 2005 by Andrew Taylor

As the web offers more and more ways to automatically gather information, entertainment, and insights that are relevant to individual users (news feeds, podcasts, customized Internet radio, etc.), and as it offers more and more ways for individuals to publish elements of their own life on-line (weblogs, photo sharing, personal playlists, etc.), a new breed of web service is working to gather all these threads together.

Some have called these services Digital Lifestyle Aggregators, others just consider them the evolution of the personal home page (gathering not just information on you, but also dynamic content from your friends and favorite web resources). Either way, the emerging services are an indicator of what’s to come in the on-line world.

Take Yahoo! 360°, for example, which draws together an individual user’s photos, restaurant reviews, friend lists, customized LAUNCHcast radio broadcast, favorite lists of books and music, and on-line groups. The service also allows a weblog for the user to comment on all of the above, or something altogether different. Users can even publish text and photos to their 360 page from their mobile phone.

Or, consider SuprGlu, a service that pulls together all of your favorite news and information feeds into a single web page. You can then read or subscribe to that aggregated page, or share it with the world. As an experiment, I created the Artful Manager Sourcebook on SuprGlu (whose web site has been a bit flakey of late), so that I can easily read (and you can too) some favorite web feeds I use in pondering my weblog content (you’ll also find a link to the Sourcebook in my weblog’s right-hand column).

Or, visit Rollyo, which lets you create customized search engines focusing on your favorite web sites, and then share those engines with others. Or, you can explore search engines crafted by others around specific topics (Latino Culture, Interactive Marketing, Salvidor Dali) or famous personalities (you can search Arianna Huffington’s favorite political blogs, for example, although I don’t know why you would).

Like any medium, these aggregators can be used for utilitarian or expressive purposes. And both roads lead to fascinating things.

I might have mentioned before, but the web is dramatically altering how our audiences/donors/volunteers/artists/staff experience culture and content, express themselves and their interests, and cluster with friends or affinity groups. Arts organizations can explore these tools to understand those changes, or to express their own mission and meaning. Or they can ignore them at their own peril.

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Comments

  1. Bosko Milekic says

    December 15, 2005 at 9:46 pm

    How about taking it one step further that merely aggregating your personal content from various sources? How about following specific (and personally interesting subsets) of what other users generate?
    This is the exact problem we’re trying to resolve at Peoplefeeds. Check us out at http://peoplefeeds.com/, glance over at the Watchlist functionality, and tell us what you would like to see to make your (and your family’s, friends’, and co-workers’) web-lives easier.

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Andrew Taylor is a faculty member in American University's Arts Management Program in Washington, DC. [Read More …]

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