Information flow

I have been playing around with adding information from other sites to the sidebar which has meant having to dust off some very rusty HTML skills but then it is only basic formatting stuff as it is all made very easy now.

I have the data from Audioscrobbler parsed through BigBold's RSS Digest service, photos from Flickr, a Technorati profile link which I got to through a post from London Dan re my Taggr idea since they already do a form of what I wanted as in bring together tags from Delicious, Furl and Flickr but do not republish in RSS, try this link for an example. I also claimed my blog there and and currently ranked 1,108,461 however getting a succesful watch has proved harder, maybe a timing thing.
I did have my Bloglines blogroll there but it was getting too messy so I took it out.

What is interesting to me in all of this is:

• how easy it is to do
• how do they make money when you disintermediate their site from the data
• how tagging your created data means it can be widely distributed
• how much fun it gets to be

In the case of photos it's really amazing as they are now on this blog, flickr obviously, on technorati when you search for my tag and with the handy javascript they give I could put them on any other website I have access to !

I wonder how long and whether I can get my folks set up with Flickr and possibly Hello !

One final point is that whilst these services are excellent they do treat the carrier as simply a utility as in 'the bit pipe' which is the carriers worst nightmare but then they do very little about it to make sure they are pro-active in this space rather than try to fortify walls and create their own weaker and less intuitive versions of web success stories.