I subscribe to you

So the recent Feedburner issue has brought up a rather heavy issue. I have littered pieces of myself all over the web, in varying identities, avatars, pseudonyms, passwords and logins. I don't want to start getting into the identity stuff, 'cause I could give a damn about single sign on. Seriously, sometimes I just want to dabble. I also have various degrees of interest where I have littered my being. And I most certainly don't want to commit to one place for all of my 'stuff' - I like variety. So, let's not go there.

What I wouldn't mind, though, is the ability to watch all of it. Watch who watches me. Watch someone else and who watches them. I want to subscribe to a person, as much or as little as interests me.

Liz commented that she didn't want to see photos or bookmarks...she just wants posts. That's cool. Liz should have that choice. Chris may want to see more...he may want to follow my photos, bookmarks, blogposts, who is talking about me, what I'm wanting to do, who I want to meet, my career updates, etc. etc. The next person may want more or less or nothing at all.

So, as Chris has discussed before, we need to be able to subscribe to a person. But I don't want to depend on a browser to do this. I would love webpages to just inherently have this function. Oh, wait...Microformats. Heh. But will they allow me to show a little or alot while others subscribe to a little or alot?

I really like what ClaimID has done. It made compiling this blog post way easy. I only claim what is important to me there (although I haven't updated it because I've been busy....gah!). Perhaps that is a start? Maybe not.

So, everyone claims to be working towards solving this and no one is working together, really. It seems like little-old-end-user-me gets lost in the kerfuffle of who is going to go down in Wikipedian history as having solved identity or loss of it or subscription to it...and they all certainly want their name on it or to gain wealth from the adoption of it.

Sigh. I mean, really, it's a very 'high end' problem anyway. I was chatting with a brilliant Celebrity blogger a couple of months back who has been blogging for 3 years and has over 50,000 daily readers who told me:

"I haven't the slightest clue what you mean by a 'feed of my blog'. You want me to write a restaurant guide?"

Heh. Her and her 50,000 readers didn't give a flying snake whether she was RSS or Atom compatible. She hadn't even turned on the ability for her readers to subscribe to her. She still sends out email newsletters and that works just fine, thank you. In fact, one of my favourite feeds in my feedreader, Photojojo, has over 10,000 email subscribers compared to their 4,000 RSS readers.

And I wonder, sometimes, whether we get a little too ahead of ourselves. And maybe we think it is progress, but it really is just a different approach. Feeds vs email vs whatever. And what I need to know about Chris is just turning around and asking him, "How are things?" But then again, that is sacreligous speak from a geek girl whose life has been transformed by Bloglines, because, previously, the information I read was from a few 'expert' sources and now I get to absorb a gaggle of voices and delve into the lives that inform them.

I don't know. What do you think? Would you like to be able to subscribe to a person? Do we really need the 'whole story'?

:: Nicole has an amazing follow up post to this...way more thought out than I could ever.