I have thought of Samscam as the window through which I manage my online identity right from the early days. From a few static webpages to the online CV that got me my job in Sheffield through various generations of this crufty home-grown blogging tool and photo gallery stuff. These days the character of it (in line with the loosely coupled service oriented vision of the world I've been espousing at work) is as an aggregator of things I release in other places with as low a cognitive-barrier in the interface as I can manage. The layout of the front page sort of boils it down into a few digestible gobbits organised loosely by what I assume people are looking for, mainly the photos and perhaps now the gigometer. It's my portfolio-less portfolio and my "lifestream" and and jumping-off point to everything else.

Work stuff doesn't exactly feature prominently at the moment but I'm starting to think there is no reason why it shouldn't - particularly as (yes you heard it here first) I'm enroled on an M.A. at Bolton. The masters is in "Learning with Technology" and so actually this question of how I manage my own online identity is of relevance and worthy of (that all important term) reflection.

There is an underlying thread here in terms of how we as a society use technology - in my case it's very much driven by my desires to present the things I create and document them. Being a coder I have the privilage to be able to do this in whatever way I might happen to choose (within the bounds of my imagination and the available technology and time) but still even for myself it is becoming very much a hodge-podge of cobbled together elements from diverse sources.

If I'm being critical of widely used web-applications such as wordpress and flickr or in the educational sphere Moodle and Blackboard I'd say that they have a tendancy to drive use through functionality rather than the other way round. They become over-complex having a myriad of options and plugins and structures within which one is obliged to work. New functionality is bolted on with little regard for the whole - moodle for example (which I've started using as part of the course) has offered me blogs and wikis and forums mapped into the tree-structure of the course with participants assigned their suitable roles. It's okay but it's still not doing everything very gracefully.

The thing is that this goes right down to the lowest level of data storage and the unbreakable convention that a relational database is a relational database with tables, columns, keys and so forth. There are other conventions out there but this has become a very very sticky metaphor because it's serious and it scales and because the software is out there to make things on the back of it.

The flip-side is something like twitter - where they've kept the paradigm simple to the point where the more users are able to invent (through social means) the convetions for more advanced behaviour such as @replys and ♺retweets (oh the joys of UTF-8 thank goodnes it's not ☂) and that as time goes by the memes drawn from usage make their way into client implementations of one sort or another.

So I'm thinking that I must keep samscam simple but make it fulfil my needs better - by continuing to combine the various things I do, providing a coherent now-view as well as giving viewers (and myself) the option to then discover and potentially re-mix or re-use the content for whatever.

This is getting all a bit theoretical so... Let's take a step back and ask what are the bits then? This is roughly how it works at the moment with a few lines drawn in in green where I think there's room for improvement:

Flickr me this...
Back when I was about 16 I got a manual SLR camera and got inspired, taking roll after roll of stuff, learning how to develop and print, keeping it integrated with the other artistic things I was doing along the way. As time went by it started getting too expensive smelly and time-consuming and frankly I just couldn't be naffed very often... Then I got a little digital camera and bolted a gallery thing onto Samscam. It worked and was pretty simple but really didn't scale up very well as my collection of photographs got larger. At some point I culled it simply to keep within my meagre allowance of disk space on the server. There was then a hiatus for some time but just over a yar ago I got my digital SLR, realised I could use Flickr for photo storage and then pull images back to samscam as needed. My creativity exploded (life circumstances of course making some difference here too) and now I even find myself re-vising the trad-techniques. Lots of shots of bands and adventures round Manchester. I'm inspired all over again and it's great. And this time it doesn't sit in a shoe box (not that it really did back when I was 16 - but far less was displayed and published)

Twitter me that...
I've been plugging away on twitter lately. Micro-blogging my day-to-day activities, finds and stuff I've noticed. I've only been doing it a few months but the format while ephemeral works very well as a water-cooler for the distributed office and wider community of professional contacts. There is idle chatter about trains and fruit skewers and real nuggets of what people are up-to in their various contexts with links and points of interest along the way. Two things that set it apart from other social networking tools are it's simplicity as I've already mentioned. It's not trying to rule your life or be host to a thousand pointless applications the way Facebook does and more muted language of "followers" rather than "friends" I feel makes a big difference to how the network percieves itself. There is far less rudeness to "un-following" someone than there is to "un-friending" them. Twitter itself may be a flash in the pan, It may die a death as global economic collapse torches and burns the business models of a swathe of internet firms - but we have the model to work with and any number of open source alternatives to save for later.

And sing me a song...
The music sites have been driven at the back end by storage from the Internet Archive for some time now. Adding stuff to the archive will update an RSS feed which in turn will update the music sites. This is genuinely really quite cool. If they were doing anything more complex than serving a few tunes for free I'd be looking at tighter integration with last.fm and iTunes but for now it's just not worth the bother.

Then there's the blog, the work blog, the other blog, the skype presence, the gazillion and one other sites and social networks I'm signed up to... Do I really need all these things? Yes - but I can concentrate them down into a coherent whole. It sucks material inwards and then gobs it back out in digestible form. There are a few bits of work to be done but in general it all revolves around the same thing - all these services put out some kind of RSS or Atom feed and lo I can aggregate them.

One final element - this is all very "push", what about "pull"? Not only is it important to aggregate everything I do but getting the feeds of comments, feedback and wider responses from the web is for the creator of things just as important as getting the stuff out there. I keep a close eye on my flickr statistics for example and the social networking sites are all about multi-lateral interaction and sharing of activity. The next challenge for me is getting all that other traffic nailed and aggregated so I can see what on earth is gong on out there as well as in here....