The Road To Powerful Instant Vertical Communities: Personal Media Aggregators

Personal Media Aggregators are the road to create instant-vertical-communities by way of becoming fulcrum points around which news, commentary, discussion, and networking opportunities around a very specific topic, brand, celebrity or writer can become a cohesive aggregating force.

Photo credit: Sorin Brinzei

Somewhere at the crossroad between personalized RSS news aggregators, of which a few have appeared during 2004, and what Marc Canter defined as DLAs or Digital LifeStyle Aggregators, that this new community-enabling technology finds it place.

Differently than DLAs, PMAs are not centered around your personal life. While Marc Canter envisioned tools that would have allowed the easy recording, management and access to personal image libraries, music, clips, preferred feeds and more, PMAs are centered around a product, a service, a company, a celebrity. PMAs bring together the different communication and interaction modes we have recently started using, allowing instant vertical communities to be rapidly created around them.

As I have stretched my view of RSS, blogs, wikis and real-time communication technologies, I see these tools not merely as deluxe information carriers but rather as flywheels around which communities of interest can be created in shorter time and with greater success than before.

Imagine providing opportunity for bulletin boards, members profile creation and sharing, and all that which would enhance the opportunities for the community to bond together around multiple thematic information channels and to be able to interact with itself at different richness levels (IM, text chat, blog comments, discussion list, forum, one-to-one audio and video chat, webcasts, etc.).

In simple words, the personl media aggregator allows a constituency to integrate and distribute selected news feeds, while aso bringing together vertical blogs, discussion forums, wiki spaces, social/business networking, instant messaging, 1-to-1 voice and video chat, webcasting venue, and a "protected" P2P network for exchanging files in multiple ways. As a matter of fact the communication, exchange and community-supporting technologies that could be integrated in such a PMA could even be more.

But the potential of pushing the envelope of what RSS aggregators into cross-platform, self-contained applications (or web-based personalized mini-portals) has yet to see the light.

To facilitate the popularization of such new ideas it is always good to describe in as much detail as possible what one foresees ahead of the others, and let the blogosphere take your idea for criticism, challenge, support and refinement.

So, what would be a PMA (personal media aggregator) be like and what would it do for you that is not already possible?