How much information do you produce in a week? month?

Between Blog Posts, Flickr Uploads, YouTube Videos, Tweets, Texts and Tags for some of us the amount is frightening.

How much of that information can you find?

That was the point of aggregation, to collect all of the digital detritus floating out on the web and sweep it into one place. Services that currently exist for this purpose seem, at least, to fall short of that mark. It’s not that they aren’t aggregating our data, everything from Friendfeed on down does that pretty well. What they fail to do is give us a coherent picture of our digital identities.

Putting Together The Pieces

It doesn’t matter how many services you allow me to add to my super-feed, what I am really interested in is being able to scan my body of work. I want to see every scrap of data that exists about me in an easy to digest fashion.

Whose talking about me?

How many profiles do I actually have?

Where am I being mentioned and whose referencing my work?

We look at brand management in these terms. There are products that exist that allow us to track a brand’s exposure and learn, in intimate detail, everything we could ever want to know a product. For whatever reason, when we move to our personal brands we turn from the idea of deep aggregation and instead focus on collection. We collect the feeds that we remember that we have and put them all in one place.

If you have to remember the information that you are aggregating, is it really an aggregator?

Maybe the problem is that a “perfect” aggregator is inherently anti-social. If there is a way for me to have the web spit back every last detail of information it has on me, I probably wouldn’t want everyone to have public access to that data. If there really was a way to generate my web identity from first principals, that could a pretty dangerous tool in the wrong hands.

There are some parts of our online lives we want to keep private, or at the very least we want to keep up the impression that they are private. If we ever developed a “‘perfect,” public aggregator that worked well it would blow this notion of privacy wide open.

That brings us to the question. When we ask for aggregation, what do we actually mean? Do you want people to be able to deep search your entire online life, or do you just want a place to store a few of your web services?

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