Wide Angle Lenz [beta]

I’ve been participating in the social world of the Internet for a while now, but the act of blogging is still relatively new to me. I’m slowly working on getting Wide Angle Lenz on a customized design and making it my own, and have some pretty cool ideas for it moving forward, but I could be posting more regularly, figure out who I want on my blogroll, network it better, etc., etc.

Something I have been thinking about for the last couple of days was sparked by a Twitter post by @kevinrose

hmm, Pownce (notes/files/links), Digg (stories), Twitter (short updates), FriendFeed (aggregated comments), do I still need a blog?

It’s definitely a valid point. Why are some of us focused on the upkeep of our personal blog, when we could go on Twittering, Digging and Flickring all we do, all feeding into one place – our FriendFeed account. I would imagine this is what FriendFeed wants, all of us to start using it as our blog. Considering the 40+ places that the site aggregates, I certainly like how easy it is to set it up once to spit out the various places I leave a mark on the Internet. So instead of saying “You can find me at Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Facebook,” why not just say “Check out all I do online at FriendFeed.” There is also a new site out called Posterous that allows people to simply email content to one place, and a profile is created for you. I really like the design of the site, but it will not replace blogs.

Replacing personal blogs (not for a group, institution or business) won’t be happening until FriendFeed offers personalized profiles, because it’s that personal touch/design that adds so much to the reading experience sometimes. When it comes down to it, yeah, the content of the site is king, but if every single personal blog looks the same, it’s just going to get boring. There’s no doubt that FriendFeed will offer personalization – just like Twitter and Pownce do (the design options for Pownce, by the way, is awesome) – but until they do, I’m still going to be trying to roll out a completely unique site that express who I am, what I think and what I do.

What do you think? Would you use FriendFeed as your “blog” if it was personalized?