Anne Zelenka has an interesting post up at GigaOm about the latest venture from Chris Messina, also known as Factory Joe or Mr. Tara Hunt. It’s an attempt to roll a kind of social-networking architecture into WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platforms around and the one I usually recommend to friends who want to start blogging (and the platform I use for this blog and others). Chris has a post about what he calls “the inside-out social network” here.
I’m going to read some more about it, since it seems to have something to do with OpenID and some other stuff as well — and Chris says that it will start with WordPress but should be able to work with all sorts of platforms — but I like the idea. Anne’s post has a great quote from copyblogger Brian Clark, who says that creating content through a social-networking application like Facebook is “like remodeling the kitchen in a house you rent.” That’s a good way of putting it.