Benwired?

Like Tom Watson, I’m becoming more dissatisfied with the concept of the weblog as a communications portal because it does not do a good job of unifying the many different ways I have to express myself online. I’ve put a number of pictures on Flickr, twittered a few random comments, created a stand alone photo gallery on this website using Zen Photo, put some of my links on Ma.gnolia and De.licio.us, and littered small bits of content across the rest of the internet.

I want a personal portal that aggregates all of my disparate content into a meaningful representation of what’s going on in my life. Jeff Croft has already started doing this with his website but he doesn’t have any plans to release the code he is using to the general public. My ideal portal would allow the owner of the portal to add new data sources through a web page…no configuration files to edit after the initial install. Adding a source of photos should be as simple as typing your flickr api key into a text field and hitting submit. Your pictures would automagically show up on you personal portal with a new heading on the front page and all of the pictures would use the same theme as the rest of the portal. Adding any external content source should be that simple.

I think that kind of portal could be created fairly simply at this point with a number of different web programming frameworks, but they all require to much configuration on the part of the web host and the end user. Installing such a portal must be as simple as installing wordpress. The installation needs to be scriptable to such a degree that Dreamhost can easily create a one-click installer.