Let me repitch one simple thing that I believe would make the web more useful – ubiquitous use of one-line-bios. It’s something I have been banging on about for years, and is now built into Typepad but hasn’t taken off.
So here’s the pitch (someone who is better at spreading memes, help me out if you feel like it):
Back in the days, lots of people were looking at online syndication, news syndication in particular, and they set up large groups to look at it (NewsML ICE etc.). – and RSS, which actually has nothing to do with syndication, blew them all away (as Jason Kottke has pointed out, RSS is basically a hypertext link and headline that points to something – there is no movement of content and hence no syndication) .
All you really need to create the same functionality as traditional syndication on the web is a clean descriptive headline and a link.
Amazingly, because it was not an easy task to get hold of a persistent link that points to a story (and not a transient page) and freely available headline text without scraping, RSS (and permalinks) emerged as an essential component of the web, honed by Darwinian simplicity.
It is clear that the news ‘syndication’ model extends to other things such as catalogue items and media files such as music playlists – but each of these has no problem in that headlines readily exist, from song titles to product names.
But for one of the most important types of information that people will link to – information about people: ‘about me’ pages, resumes, friends list etc., there is no common use of a headline.
It is common enough to just link from a person’s name, but a name is not unique or descriptive enough to entice you to click through.
Imagine if all news stories were linked to by the name of the publication, without any headlines.
Creating a resume is hard, it takes time – but a one line summary is easier and useful. So the plea is this:
Create a one line description of yourself, a one-line-bio for others to use in conjunction with your name. I.E in all the places from blogrolls to links to about me pages on weblogs or social networks or FOAF files or resume postings. Anywhere where you would normally use your name as a link, use name: one-line-bio.
Personal headlines. I believe that’s what is needed for a ‘people’ version of RSS to take off.
Here’s an example (mine is in my side bar):
One line bio: British, based in York UK, technical director at infosential , runner, geek