My Idea For A True Content Aggregation Service

November 08, 2008

I’ve been struggling with a problem for a while now. The problem is how to properly display on my site everything online that I create vs. everything online that I find and enjoy. The issue is that these two types of content need to be differentiated to provide maximum value to readers.

dmiessler_discovered_content

So here are my requirements.

  1. I want to be able to instantly send any content that I’m viewing, regardless of medium, to my website as a link. So if I’m reading an essay/article or watching a video clip, I want to hit a single button and have it highlighted on my site’s sidebar under Discovered Content.

  2. And I want the same capability for any content I create myself, but that would happen automatically as I posted it. So if I post an essay on my blog, or I send some images to Flickr, Tweet something, or I write a comment on Reddit, I want a link to that content in my site’s sidebar as well, but this time under Created Content.

I think the best distinction you can make regarding content is whether you made it yourself, or whether you’re simply passing it along as part of your input stream. Created vs. Discovered. Output vs. Input.

So here’s what I’m proposing: a service that separately collects together everything you create vs. everything you discover online, and then builds an aggregate syndication feed for each, and then gives you a simple javascript block that you can drop into your site to display each.

So it’ll:

  • Collect your content (both created and discovered)

  • Aggregate each into two distinct feeds (think Yahoo! Pipes)

  • Give you a javascript snippet that you can use to embed it in your site/blog

Here’s a simple mock-up of the architecture as I see it:

dmiessler_content_aggregation

This is very rough right now, but if I still think this is a good idea in like a week I’m going to contact some people at my favorite services, e.g. Google, FriendFeed, to see if they’d be interested in implementing it.

Any thoughts? Does this sound like something people would be interested in?

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