I've been sick all week and haven't been able to muster up the energy to write much of anything, but in the interest of not ignoring the blog, I will point out a new site/service which seems very interesting.

Like many of the people who probably read this blog, I read about Swivel on TechCrunch the other day. I haven't fully explored it yet, but it claims essentially to be a social data-sharing service. The reason I think this is important is that it brings social-networking down to its bare functionality - and it's surprisingly useful.

Any online social network is essentially concerned with the aggregation and comparison of data and metadata. Facebook wants no more than to collect the data of every college student in the form of pictures and text, del.icio.us collects the data of a user's affinity, thoughts, and tags for a site, and so on. It seem that what Swivel now allows is a way to take less aesthetically pleasing data (candy sales in 2004 for instance) and place it into an archival and socally-driven network.

On one hand I can see this becoming useful for teachers as a way to aggregate data from class-work in a way that students might enjoy, but I more see this as an example of the over-all direction of social media. That is, the direction toward a more all-emcompassing data (of all sorts) archivization and socialization.