I like to keep a lot of souvenirs from trips, might that be a ticket stub or other silly little things. I have boxes of them. I did the same in the virtual world; I archive all my bits and bytes since I started with computer. I still have all the programming assignments from the university; I have over 1GB of email from old email accounts; I have NP_Twitter archives all my tweets; Pidgin has all my YM/ICQ/MSN IM logs; My pictures are stored off-line and my on-line gallery photo albums.



I have the urge to preserve all my stuff.

As we enter the Web 2.0 era, new services were introduced everyday; on-line email, web application suites, web photo albums, social bookmarking, RSS feed burner/reader. A lot of people use it, many develop for it, and the net is all about it.

However, I never really too excited about all these web services. In fact, I only use a handful of them, mostly Yahoo mail/Gmail, and Google search. I don't like my information scatter all over the Internet. I'd rather able to archive/backup what I got on-line. You never know if the web service that hold all your stuff will be around tomorrow. Privacy also some of my concern.

I want total control of my data.

In another word, my web is me-centric, a platform to hold all my data and provide a window to feed me information from the web. It provides a portal to the Internet, construct in the way I prefer.

With the popularity of web service API, I am able to integrate Web 2.0 service to my private, localize, web service. It's so called mashup. My blog is running on my own server and becomes a platform to captures my thought, knowledge, and bits and pieces. With this, it mashup with other web services; NP_Technorati and NP_Blogroll submit links back to del.io.us NP_Twitter integrates tweets into my blog. Also, it is a form of archive.

I like to reinvent the wheel, in order to learn how things work.

But this platform's sole purpose is to for me to consume, even it facilities web2.0 interaction; allow comments, implemented trackback, provides RSS function, map to tag cloud. It's only an island in the sea of ether. In reality, this platform rarely got much interaction from others, unable to ignite and foster communication, and promote sharing of idea/discussion with others. These are one of the most important elements of web 2.0.

Does that mean I am not able to embrace web2.0? How can I make my silo more connect to the web2.0 world?

With the emerge of web service API and widgets, it provides the mean to do mashup with my personal web portal. The next wave going to hit with the introduction of OpenID and OAuth, which allow my private web to further integrate with the rest of the web 2.0 infrastructure, hopefully.