Ideally it would be fully automated – whenever I buy a book, rent or watch a movie, tv show, eat at a restaurant, buy a new CD or listen to a new release on Rhapsody, buy a new piece of software or electronics, etc, there should be a new entry in an RSS feed with the appropriate tags. I can then go back and review any particular entry if I feel like it, and/or change the status – for example, if I bought a book and then I actually finished reading it, or gave up on it, or whatever. DMD pointed out that I could use my treo to ‘scan’ the barcodes of stuff not purchased online – I know there is software out there to read the number out of a barcode photo, so it should be possible for the treo to at least grab the UPC and email it into the system.
There is a certain amount of tie-in to the clickstream logging that organizations such as Attention Trust are spearheading, although I don’t think I am quite ready to make my entire clickstream public. It would be nice to have an interface, where I could look through my clickstream and check some boxes to make interesting pages public. You can of course do this reasonably well with delicious or other similar tools.
An interim step, short of full automation, would be to at least have a web app where I could enter in new purchases or experiences and then review them either at that time or later. This should be pretty easy to build although I have not yet seen anything that would work exactly the way I would like. I am hoping that Dabble will enable me to build this out once they give me an account.
Posted by Stephen Bronstein at March 14, 2006 12:34 PM