I have been struggling with the current infrastructure for social media, and writing about various issues that have been surfacing with Technorati (see here and here) and other tools of the trade. I had a thought today, when I got out of the office and went for a walk, clearing out the cobwebs: maybe the best path woulkd be to devise a distributed architecture for social media.

To some extent, we are doing that, organically. People post links to other blogs, quote other people, reuse tags from other bloggers, and lift memes that others have developed or improved. We create blogrolls. So there is a lot of distributed social stuff going on.

But what I envision is something more automated, local tools or plugins that create more complex and sophisticated presentation of the connections between us in the blogosphere:

• Every time I update my blog, I would like an automatic recreation of the list of the 10 (or 20, or 100) blogs and authors that I link to the most, or most recently. I would like those to be generated on my server, like other Moveable Type indexes, and accessible in such a way that I can include them in my margin, like other widgets.
  
• Ditto for the tags and categories I use most or most recently.
  

And then, I would like to be able to send that updated information -- a social profile of my blog -- to a central repository. There, that information could be collated with other profiles, to create a social network map of blog cross references. Note, having such a distributed model, where the initial work is handled by each individual blog server, and where updates only happen at the point of rebuilding, could decrease the complexity explosion that seems to be pestering Technorati, PubSub, and others.

Likewise, I could poll the central server to gain information for another widget: who is referencing my blog, which entries are most and most recently referenced, what tags and categories are being picked up, and so on.

I am perfectly happy that there is a site like Technorati -- where I can go to inquire about links and so on. But what I would rather have is to have these these presentation capabilities built-into or plugged into the blog itself, rather than having to go there to see it. This could be by extending the architecture of the blog platform (are you listening, Mena, Ben, Anil, Barak?), through plugins, or through other trickery.

The central repository would be the place where my blog would request information about outside references to Get Real, but once again, I would like to have an in-built blog widget that would send the request to the central repository -- "how many references have been created pointing to to Get Real in the past 24 hours" -- and then render the results. And, of course, much of this information could be formulated as an RSS feed.

Anybody who has any pointers to anything along these lines, please contact me. Corante is at work on the design of Corante 2.0 (as we call it internally), and we have a long list of architectural attributes we would like to make standard against the new blog platform we are planning to build on top of Moveable Type. Alternatively, anybody interested in working to develop such capabilities, also contact me.