One thing that’s become obvious to me after working on and thinking about Distributed Microblogging is that all forms of messaging are essentially the same. The only differences between email, IM, chat and microblogging are quantitative not qualitative. There are only matters of degree in length, asynchrony and number of recipients. While it is true that sometimes a matter of degree results in a defacto matter of kind, I’m convinced there is some kind of Grand Confluence of these different messaging modalities in our future.

I didn’t include blogging as messaging because the essence of a message is that the sender initiates the transfer. So even though you might subscribe to a blog using RSS, feed readers still operate by polling, i.e., periodically checking for something new. So blogging is still basically a “pull” operation, where messaging is a “push”.

But blogging and messaging can be thought of as similarly implemented if we separate two notions: message content and message notification. Think of sending a message as two operations. First, I create and store the message content on a place I’ll call my Personal Publishing Site or PPS. Second, I send out a short notification message to the recipients, with a link or key back to the stored post on my PPS. Third, using the link or key I provided in the notification, the recipients call back and get the content from my PPS. Now, in the case of small messages like IM, chat or microblogging, it would be a time and bandwidth saver to just send the message body along with the notification. One correlation that seems pretty consistent is that short messages like IM, chat or microblogging tend to get sent more frequently and with a shorter delivery requirement than say, email or blog posts, which can languish for days without being read.

What if all messaging operated this way? What if, instead of going to different sites to talk to friends there with different tools and capabilities, we created and sent (published and notified) all messages using our own Personal Publishing Site? What if community or other types of sites could receive our PPS messages and post copies of them or links to them?

We have a glimpse into the possibilities of this world with Identi.ca and the open source software that powers it, Laconica. What if everyone ran their own laconica service? That would be like a Personal Microblogging site. What if our OpenID page contained meta-data about what laconica server to use to contact us? What would that mean for the notion of community sites? Would they become more like simple mailing lists if you didn’t have to “go” there to communicate with your friends who might also be friends there? In this model of the world, we’d have discussions by a sort of Dueling Banjos publishing. I publish a message which you read, then you respond by publishing a message that I read. Depending on how subscription works only you and I might see the messages, or they might be seen by a wider group of our subscribers or anyone, sort of like an @ conversation on Twitter.

ps: The DISO project is attempting to address some of these issues, if you want to pop over there and do a little reading.

Holy Moly! This coming Friday is PodCampNYC 2. I’m doing a session called “OpenID for Newbies” and I have to get cracking on getting the PowerPoint together. Fortunately, I have much of the source material already in the form of an OpenID preso I did at PodCampBoston2 last fall.

I’m really looking forward to this PodCamp because I’ve met so many people online since the first PodCampNYC about a year ago, and I want to meet them in person. In particular, I can’t wait to “virtureal” (meet in person someone one knows only online) my co-podcasters on PushMyFollow, Annie Boccio (@banannie), Christine Cavalier (@purplecar) and Michael Gaines (@istarman), all of whom live in the Jersey, Philly area.

Two more virtureals I’ve been wanting to make for a long time are video editor extraordinaire Bill Cammack (@billcammack) and video podcast goddess Roxanne Darling (@roxannedarling). I’ve gotten to know Bill through mutual friends online. If it works out time-wise, I’d love to meet up with Bill at the beer mecca Burp Castle in the East Village, where I’ve seen him in so many Flickr photos.

I’ve known Roxanne in the online sense for well over a year. Her Beachwalks with Rox is one of the longest running videoblogs/podcasts on the net. I have to say, Beachwalks was one of my inspirations to get into vlogging and social media. We’ve been promising each other for months that one day we’d meet up and I’ve even gotten a proxy-hug from Rox through Laura Fitton (@pistachio), but now it’s finally going to happen! Yay!

I’m also looking forward to renewing in-person friendships with NYC peeps like Kathryn Jones, Jesse Chenard, Grace Piper and Charles Hope that I haven’t seen in a while. A special ex-Boston-now-NYC friend I haven’t seen since her farewell party last November is Julia Roy (@juliaroy).

One technically oriented meetup I want to make is with David Recordon, the young distributed applications guru and OpenID advocate. I have a lot of the same interests in trying to break down the walled gardens of social media and social networking, and David is a leader in that movement.

But yeah, although there is plenty of cool content to consume in the sessions, it’s pretty obvious that the real reason I go to podcamps is for the friendships. I’m thankful that I don’t have to justify the “business value” of going to podcamp to some finance department troll in Corporate America. I’m the CEO of me, and I say it’s worth it.