Yesterday I read a post by Rachel Hinman at Adaptive Path, about “The Mobile Internet and Mix Tapes”, where she compared the emerging trends in mobile information architecture to the days when we broke down albums into songs, creating our own mix tapes in rebellion from the structure imposed upon us by the record labels. My passion and area of expertise relates less to the Mobile Web and more to the Social Web, and I was really inspired by the analogy of the mix tape as it relates to the Social Web as well.

In the same way that we wanted to take songs from various albums to create our own personal soundtracks, over the last year or so there’s been an emerging trend of taking content from various social websites and trying to pull it in to one personal space. We have photo albums on Flickr, sites we like to bookmark on del.icio.us or ma.gnolia, our written thoughts on our blogs (be it LiveJournal, a myspace blog, or our own Wordpress thing).

Like an album from a record label, Flickr gives us photo albums. Del.icio.us gives us bookmarks. Our blog gives us posts. This information architecture is imposed upon us by the tools we choose to use, but here we go, breaking it apart.

We no longer want our content in specific content-based silos. We’re creating wider categories in which to organize our “stuff.” As an example, I came across a personal website for one Denna Jones. It’s a very well designed site. I particularly enjoyed reading the colophon, in which the designers explain:

Before we started planning, we knew that Denna was already actively using the functionality of other web sites to share her work and thoughts. It made no sense to reproduce the functionality here when we knew we could import her content from other sites and use it on this one.

Denna wanted to create a place that was about her. “Denna” is the overarching category, with photos, posts, and links filling in the content that defines what Denna Jones is all about. The developers used their technology to break down the little bits of content from various sites to create the mix tape that is dennajones.com.

This is hardly the first website of this kind, but it’s a very nicely done example. I find it interesting to note the date on the colophon: March 31, 2008, and that it’s a custom PHP technology I assume was built from scratch for this purpose. I think there’s a real need for a tool that will allow the masses to create this kind of thing for their own, and it’s exciting to me to think we are on the cusp of a technology revolution similar to the digital music revolution that allowed the masses to easily create our own playlists, CDs, buy individual songs, and organize our own personal soundtracks in unlimited ways.

Almost a year ago, my friend Tom Watson published A Case for the Crusty Old Website, where he touches on a lot of the same topics I’ve discussed here, making a case for having a “stake in the internet ground” to call your own. He and Jeff Croft have developed a system in Django that allows them to pull in content from various publishing and networking sites and use it however they like in their personal sites. The technology still takes a huge amount of setup, sweat, and tears for all but the savviest of programmers and isn’t (yet) what I call “ready for the masses.”

Maybe there is a tool out there that I haven’t heard of. Maybe it’s in beta, and its release date is right around the corner. Maybe this is being discussed everywhere, in hushed conference rooms, as “the next big thing.” I’m seeing a big need for it, whatever it is. When it comes out, if it’s done right, it’s going to be huge.

In a looser example of the content as mix tape analogy, I’ll offer up my blog “Things that amuse me.” The type of content in this blog is almost completely irrelevant. The items I post could be text posts, quotes, links to other sites, photos I took, photos someone else took, content that was forwarded to me in an email, a video, a song, any number of things. These items are tied together as “things” that I happen to find amusing. The next organizing factor is, simply, date posted. The most prominent items are those things that amused me most recently.

I use Tumblr for this kind of blog. It’s a simple, easy way to share bits and pieces of different kinds of content in a chronological format. It even works as a CMS tool for more text-heavy posts, if you don’t mind either not having comments, or hacking a comment plug-in into the tool.

Tumblr will even let you pull in content from other tools on the web. Anything with an RSS feed could be imported into your Tumblr log. You could also use FriendFeed, SocialThing, or a myriad of other social feed aggregators to do the same thing.

But what happens when I want to organize my content? With these feed aggregators, your only option is chronological organization. These tools, in my opinion, are too simple. It’s akin to making a mix tape, then realizing you wanted to insert a song in between two you already recorded. We’re more advanced than that.

On the other hand, the custom PHP or Django tool, at this time, is too complex. It’s a great tool, but if you want to organize something a bit differently than the developers decided to do it, you have to crack open a programming book and get to pushing code around. Sorry, but that’s not my idea of a good time.

Maybe a tool like this already exists. Like I said, maybe it’s already in development. I’ll tell you what I think it should be. It doesn’t matter if it’s a social networking site, it just needs to give people the tools to carve out a little spot of their own, customize it (either a little or a lot), import their content, then organize it however they want.

When organizing personal content, people need options besides chronological or content type. This is where so many feed aggregator tools are getting it wrong. Maybe people want photos mixed with blog posts, but status messages in a sidebar. Maybe they want to keep it private, open to just friends. Maybe they want to let the public comment on everything. Let the people decide, then, hey, why not go a step further and let viewers have some options.

After the atrocity that was a custom myspace profile, I loved when Virb came out with fully customizable profiles, but added a “remove customization” button. You know, for those times when you might want to see that content someone decided might look good in pink on a flashing pink and green background.

With everyone jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and signing up for every little tool that comes along to let you share and publish content, it’s been a long time coming that the trend will come back around to wanting to pull that content back in to one central hub. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I’m grateful to Rachel Hinman at Adaptive Path for the mix tape metaphor that inspired me to get my thoughts in order.