After some thinking and conversations with people it became clear that the whole concept of PBNs is not clear. The more I dive into it the bigger and more complicated it becomes. I've constructed the stack diagram below to help guide me and communicate to others what I am thinking. The foundational services of PBNs are provided by caching, distributed computing, and P2P applications. Individually, these technologies are massive and powerful. When combined and focused by a common API set and services set to serve personal content creation, they become a high energy laser beam.
These APIs will be embedded in and services made available to the personal publishing tools (Blogger, TypePad, Radio UserLand, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, WordPress, etc.). Hopefully, we can create easy to use interfaces that people can take control of to do new and interesting things. Many of the existing interfaces, particularly for caching and distributed computing, are locked away in obscurity. I'd love to unlock them to see if they can grow in the light or wilt and die.
Via the various plug-in architectures available in the personal publishing tools, plug-ins will be created to harness, process, and analyze data that comes back to the content creator via the PBN foundation services. You can see some of my ideas above. I will expand on these ideas in future posts.
The very first part of this I thought I would push toward is a combination of the caching foundation stone and the reporting and analytics plug-in. Caching via CDNs is fairly well established as a known means to scale web content and large media files. Caching in combination with harvesting data from the CDN is also fairly well established. I intend to make the link between these services, which have been traditionally expensive and off limits to individual content creators, and blogs. There is more to come on this in the next few weeks.
I’d appreciate thoughts and feedback on the sketch I’ve provided above. It is just that, a sketch to be refined through conversation.
