I just noticed that Derek Powazek has updated his site. Not sure when he actually made the change but I definitely like the concept because it’s something similar to what I wanted to do in the past as well. That is create more of an awareness site versus a typical blogging site.
As Derek notes in the description on his now one page site, he “is too busy to maintain a site anymore”. This is an excellent reason why you’d want to build an awareness site versus a blogging site. You basically don’t have the time to invest in blogging, yet you still want to let people know what you’re currently doing. In effect, you’re just relaying small little bits of changing information or the situational awareness of your life (although Derek expands upon this by relaying some of his notable achievements in his past as well).
For example, for the site that I was going to build, the home page was going to relay a variety of things about me, such as where I currently lived, what I did for work, who I worked for, and maybe the current project I was working on. In addition, it would relay more basic things like what I was currently listening to, watching, and reading. Basically you could add any type of information that you wanted people to be able to track (since each item would have an RSS feed for it or be a part of one larger collective feed if you wanted to track everything I did).
Now of course the interesting thing is that each of these things relayed on the home page would be clickable as a link. Thus you could click where I lived (Vancouver) to read more about my personal perspective of Vancouver. Not only that though, you could then click back and see all of the other various places I’ve lived in the past as well. The same would apply to what I was reading. You click the current book I’m reading to see my opinion of it but then you could see all of the previous books I’ve read as well. If you didn’t have the time to review the book though, the clickable link for the book could just be a direct link to Amazon.com instead.
So where’d I’d get this idea from? The seed for it was actually planted in my head a while back when I watched Dick Hardt’s presentation about Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005. I found it very interesting that he relayed who he was by relaying what he was reading, where he worked, and so forth which when collectively put together, helped to define who he was as a person. Thus I realized if you could recreate this on a website somehow, you could create a simple summary of a person’s identity in the same way and in turn help relay to others what you’re currently engaged with at the time as well.