Social Network Aggregation - Blog Centricity?

There are many social networking platforms and content items that we want to share with our friends, contacts, family members. The problem is that with so many platforms, some of which are very specific, it is difficult to keep track of comings and goings.

Enter a new/revised role for the blog. That of Social Network Aggregation.

Many of the platforms provide some from of publishing aide, call them badges, widgets, gadgets whatever they have the same basic purpose. They allow a blogger to insert elements into their blogs to share content and site links.

Having played with some of these tools the effect can be a very cluttered blog that might send the wrong message. Some people blog on separate themes and want to partition up the content to help the subscriber base. They might blog on technology in one area, management or self improvement in an another.

Blogger has added lots of new features and the blogger community has further enhanced the capabilities of the free tool.

It is already possible to add content to a blog to aggregate feeds from blogs, micro blog updates from Jaiku or Twitter and feeds from some of your social platforms like Plaxo. You can add your wishlist from Amazon to share your wants with your friends and family. You can add contact details into your blog with options including immediate access to you on IM.

You can link blogs together and limit access to some that become mini-sites to your main blog. This allows you to control access to some and not others for you more private elements that you want to share in a limited way.

Blogging platforms are set to extend into the social networking space as people seek more control and dimensions on their business, public and private lives.

You can see some of the possibilities at my aggregation site.

It seems that others are of the same opinion, read the article from Om Malik on Wordpress.