ReadWriteWeb

We've seen a lot of new aggregation services and lifestreaming applications come into play recently, and we've questioned whether they're adding to the conversation or just adding to our information overload. (See our coverage on FriendFeed, for example). And today, MyBlogLog even added even more lifestreams to subscribe to.

The truth of the matter is, like it or not, the conversations that once existed solely in the blogosphere have now moved on. People still comment, but in a lot of cases, those comments aren't on found on the blog itself. So the question is, has the conversation become diluted among all the different services and applications? Or is it just adding layers to the original topic? And most importantly, how can you keep up?

A very interesting site for whistle blowers called WikiLeaks is facing government censorship as today a California judge reportedly ruled that the company in control of the site's domain name must shut down public access to the entire site. You can visit the site directly via its IP address. (Thanks, TechDirt) See a wide randing discussion over on Techmeme and a collection of resources we've assembled for tracking this and related issues, below.

On the most recent episode of ReadWriteTalk, I sat down with Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed. Both have been successful 'intrapreneurs' inside of Google. Buchheit created GMail; while Taylor created Google Maps with another one of the 4 FriendFeed founders, and then led the Google developer tools program. After leaving Google separately, they eventually started working together on FriendFeed, originally as Entrepreneurs in Residence at Benchmark (we get into more details on the podcast).

In mid-december, I interviewed Kevin Marks (Developer Advocate, Google Open Social) on Read/WriteTalk . One of the areas we spent considerable time discussing was Open Social's Activity Streams. Since that interview, I have found myself reflecting a lot about the increasing number of social networks that create 'feeds' around user activity within the site. As someone who has been an avid user of RSS for the past few years and created a product to intelligently filter sets of RSS feeds, it probably isn't surprising this is a trend I'm quite bullish about. I'm certainly not the only one who is finds this development promising.