Attention Streams - Your life in feed

Stowe Boyd just pointed me to posts that Emily Chang and He (separately) just posted about Data streams.

From Emily Chang's post.

For now, this activity stream idea is providing the start to a holistic view of my activity across online networks: both my own and the ones I use. In turn, this acts as a conduit for you, the reader. Rather than just a static “recommended links” page or a blogroll, the data stream opens up my activity to you in semi-realtime and at one website.

They are both interesting posts on Personal Aggregation. There is a service called Jaiku which does much of the same thing without the databasing and searching.

I personally don't see the aggregation of multiple feeds as anything too amazing. That's what a feed reader does. The more interesting improvement is the fact that the data is then re-syndicated to a single, aggregated feed. But Touchstone has been doing that for months and months. And any feed splicing service can do it easily. Our feed also includes ranks for how 'Personally Relevant' each of the items were.

The final step that seemed interesting to Emily was databasing the results and searching on them later - that would be an easy output adapter to make.

Stowe has focused on the idea of routing items to other applications so you can take action on your attention stream. This too would be a simple matter of writing an output adapter to trap Microformats etc from Touchstone. In fact it's been on our adapter ideas page for ages. It's been there since before I can remember.

Once we release the updated SDK to developers they should be made in short order.

As a bonus, Touchstone would also alert you to important changes in your stream.

Might have to chat to my mate Stowe about the project he is cooking up - could be room to work together on it!