The following is what I believe Six Apart’s Project Comet will entail (and a lot of it equals the approaches that I’ve been researching myself). I started writing this out earlier today and it kept getting bigger and bigger in detail. Too big actually. Therefore, here is the extremely short version (which is still lengthy).
Instead of breaking a single blog down into parts using category tags, think instead of creating small focused micro-blogs or "streams" that are connected together (like the strands of DNA) into one overall encompassing blog. Yes, we’re talking small pieces loosely joined again. These streams can be anything and everything. They could be a micro-blog specifically focused on web design, cooking, restaurants, movies, music, books, your podcasts, documents, whatever! The idea here is to break down your thoughts into these basic building blocks of streams which you then combine together to create your entire "river" of thought. Of course what was stopping people from doing this before in the past (as I tried to do it myself more than few times) is some way of connecting or aggregating these streams (which TypePad now has incorporated within their system).
What’s the big deal? Why break content down in these streams? Well since they are the basic building blocks for a website or blog, you can mix and match these streams anyway you choose and even more importantly you can create multiple dynamic blogs on the fly to better suite their intended targets. For example, lets say I talk about web design, gaming, cooking, travel, and then the typical stuff like movies, music, and books. I decide to create a stream for each of these topics. From the backend management tool, I just manage all of these separate streams from one location. From the front end though, my visitors actually see three different websites that I’ve dynamically built using these streams. My web design site uses a techno design and template to show off my web design, movies, music, and books streams. My social weblog utilizes a stylish lounge design and template to show off my cooking, restaurants, travel, and music streams. And finally my gaming blog utilizes a kick ass gaming design and template to show off my gaming, movies, music, and books streams. In effect, I’m using the same content streams but reconfiguring them together in different ways to match my target audience.
Of course the next step is community aggregation. Let’s say I have couple of friends who also do web design but they have streams that talk about gaming, movies, music, and books as well. I think their content in these streams is great so I ask them to collaborate with me on it, invite them to my gaming blog via the backend system, and voila their streams (which they manage from their own backend panel) are inserted and mixed with my own stream automatically. Now we have a group weblog on gaming that is starting to kick ass with our combined content. Whoa, wait a minute were doing so good that we start getting decent traffic. Wow, it looks like a lot of traffic. So we decide to throw up some Google ads to see if we can make some money. Wow, we do! Hmm, but how do split the money we make? No worries, the system has already figured that out for us by calculating how much we’ve made and dividing those funds proportionally between each stream based upon the traffic and popularity of the content from each one.
I think you can figure the rest out now with regards to how families would create their own private dynamic sites with their collective streams on pets & animals, books, movies, and so forth. Also, to start doing working with streams right now yourself (no matter what blogging software you’re using), all you need to do is divide up your content into these micro-blogs (like different channels on a TV set) and then find some way of aggregating your latest content from each of them on the homepage of your site (either via server side scripts software or maybe something like FeedDigest). BTW one of the nice side effects of this approach is that not only do you get a focused feed for each stream but you also get a separate focused feed for the comments for that stream as well.
