While doing research for a course I’m pitching, something hit me: I have so many frickin’ blogs!

With the influx of money in social software and the term “blog” now resting comfortably on the lips of your local soccer moms, sites are unexpectedly throwing free blogs at me like nickels at a Carnivale cooch show. Granted, I’m certainly not helping the matter, what with launching a new group blog and signing up for a few others, but it’s somewhat disconcerting to me that I now have a Friendster blog. Welcome to the age of the personal YAB (yet another blog). No wonder so many of the millions of blogs are abandoned. Most of them were probably born unwanted in the first place.

But it’s not just Friendster. It’s also services I like. Services I use. Services who I feel I’m letting down by not fulfilling my service-specific blogging potential. Let’s pause for a quick run-down of all the blogs or blog-like things I own or can contribute to, in decreasing order of my attention:

my ProphecyBoy blog
my LiveJournal
my Flickr photostream
my del.icio.us link list
the Son of Semele Ensemble site
Yahoo 360
my 43 Things blog
my Friendster blog
(I’ve staunchly avoided having a MySpace account, and YAB, by forcing other people to use it for me. Sorry, MySpace, you’re just too close kin to Friendster for me.)

I know, some of these things (del.icio.us, for example) are technically not blogs. But I use them in conjunction with the blogs, and they certainly are blog-adjacent, and you could have a very nice link blog with del.icio.us or photoblog with Flickr without using any other service (though I resisted the urge to list everything I participate in which produces an RSS feed - that would be insanity). I’m also leaving out the work stuff, mind you, and I’m not currently contributing to any pro blogs at the moment, so that list is sometimes longer.

Finally, the point of all this: that’s a hell of a lot of output to produce, if I really want to keep up with all of them, and a hell of a lot of browsing someone would have to do if they really wanted to stalk me. Do I really deserve a folder of eight feeds in my stalker’s copy of Net News Wire? Well, maybe my stalker’s, but certainly not anyone else’s. And, like I said, I feel guilty for ignoring, say 43 Things, because I really do like the service and want to write about my goals, I’m torn over whether I should put them there, where people who are looking for them will see them, or here, where people looking for me will see them. Or some aggregated version of both, using every combination of REST and iframes under the sun.

Yesterday, while I was tooling around on Yahoo 360, I think I hit on a solution. Actually, Yahoo hit on a solution, and I decided to steal it and make it mine. The advantage of 360 over other blogging solutions is that it’s nicely integrated with all of Yahoo’s services. That means that, like Friendster, I have a friends list that, like LiveJournal, can control who has access to what information. Information that can come be a blog post, photos, music, announcements (the really cool Blast feature) and even reviews of restaurants and movies. But here’s the kicker: soon, “You’ll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°.” Aha! Veeeery clever, Yahoo. They’re providing a place where I can aggregate all my content into one place. If it’s executed well, I’ll be able to pull all that data from the list above into one page (and - dare I hope - one RSS feed), where I have easy-to-use controls over who has access to what. That means I’ll be free to keep link lists on del.icio.us, my photos on Flickr (which will, probably, be integrated eventually), my media on ourmedia, and my writing on my own site, but they will all be accessible on my Yahoo 360 page. It will be a personal aggregator, constantly pulling new content that I post anywhere, and making it easy for others (hell, even me) to keep track of what I’m doing. And because 360 blends the user-groups of LJ with the degree-permissions of Friendster, it will be easy to make sure my boss doesn’t see the pictures from the last Backyard Drag Show, and that my friends don’t miss my latest rant on cheese.

Yahoo hasn’t taken the wraps off the RSS syndication features of 360, so I don’t know it will work quite that seamlessly. Nonetheless, they’re certainly moving toward the idea of a Personal Aggregator, which makes 360 not YAB, but something I’ll actually use.