InsaneJournal

Current mood:	contemplative
Entry tags:	meta, rambling writer, random

Random update
Haven't been around for a bit (dental work getting done + finals + starting work soon = BUSY AS HELL). But I'm alive, and collating links and info and stuff! Oh, and plotting AST, still. :D

Something that really caught my eye in my RSS reader today: this post at pmarca.com that talks about Ning and how Google's Friendconnect and Open Social projects will really boost the usefulness of Ning. If you don't know already, Ning is a site that allows you to make social networks for any reason or purpose, and gives you about the same functionality as facebook and myspace do, only with the fact that YOU own/run the network, and can customize it as you see fit. What Friendconnect and OpenSocial will do for Ning is basically allow people to let the users/members of their network flow from site to site and still retain the social context of the network they are part of.

Which, I think, is totally something fandom needs. Social context is huge in the LJ and general fandom space; being able to put in that social context by dropping in little blocks of code into pretty much any website will free us from the silo-like enclosures that even the best sites impose on us. Comments and commenter identity would be available to any site that decides to put in the Friendconnect comments block. And anyone and everyone could make their own website and link it back to everything just by putting in some snippets of code.

I think it's time I tried out Ning for myself, to see if this is workable. Because if it is, goodbye reliance on LJ/Wordpress/Myspace/Quizilla/Fanfiction.net; hello portable social information. :D

ETA: Test network up and running here: http://dexteri.ning.com/
Invite link/join link (I'm not sure which) here: http://dexteri.ning.com/?xgi=2pw3nys