I have been thinking about a blog for a lot of time now. A lot of my friends have blogs and even though some of them put a lot of effort into the the desing and structure, they still look a bit the same. That's not so important, as the content is the biggest and most valuable thing a blog can have. But still, because I am a software designer, I want cool features, well-thought of details and new approaches. To see and to use and perhaps later on to build into my software.
This Chronolog is one of my prototypes. I always preferred developing my own software over using freeware generic solutions, so I could get a better insight on how things work and how they should work. This turned out to be one of the better choices I've made in my life. And I always liked to have something special, something that would distinguish me in a flood of information, software and people.
After using Delicous boomarking engine and studying information classification, checking Last.fm music data mining, and seeing how Facebook and Twitter are evolving, the concept was shaping up. All Web 2.0 solutions are already cross-connected, but information is still scattered around the web. That is why you need a central point, something that doesn't connect the sources (like FriendFeed), but something that connects information instead.
After Samo, our tech guru, integrated our corporate web site with Twitter, I had everything I needed, and for first time I could really see the power of RSS feeds. I went for Flixter over Rottentomatoes for rating movies (this is an example of information over source, I needed a movie rating service, not another social networking), because they did not offer RSS. And I really need RSS, so I can take the data from the service and put it on my Chronolog. Add a few blog posts per month and it perhaps we have something interesting.
For now, this information turned out to be bookmarks (Delicious), microblogs (Twitter), loved music (Last.fm), rated movies (Flixter) and of course, blog posts. Facebook proved to be useless here, as it is becoming more of an aggregator than a service. Perhaps LinkedIn would turn out more useful for connections, but I haven't decided if showing networking progress is even usable.
Let me know what you think.