Last week, Ben, Mena, and her Mom demoed 6A’s next generation blogging platform, Project Comet. I haven’t seen much about it beyond those two links, but I love what I see so far.

Jason apparently thinks it won’t be a big step forward, but I have to disagree. From what’s been posted, it’s obvious that 6A is tackling many of the core next-generation blogging issues head-on. Here’s my response to the three points touched upon on the project page:

• Community Aggregation (Reading): despite the years of sucky RSS aggregator development, convenient aggregation/slicing is something that needs to be fundamentally integrated into a community blogging system. I’m glad 6A agrees. This is what will power the positive feedback loop. Hopefully, Comet will also make some conceptual advances in follow-up comments/posts.
• Multiple Streams (Single Stream/Structured Blogging): it’ll yet to be seen whether there will be an ingestion framework for external data (integrating Flickr, Upcoming, 43*, Del input seems obvious – Web 2.0 magic!), or whether there’ll be actual work done on creating extensible structured blogging capabilities, but this seems to be on the right track
• Privacy (Semi-permeability): being able to control what you share to whom. So basic. Yet, so not been done well yet. Hopefully they’ll take the functional lessons learned from LJ and also, um, create a humane UI for both representing and controlling privacy (uhh, also, passworded entries are lame, I hope that’s secondary to a social trust system)

I’ve hacked on bits of several of these aspects over the years, and also crystalized a lot of my thinking while developing campus-wide blogging @ USC (I co-organized a panel earlier this year where we touched on some of these issues [TODO: post presentation notes, which has much more detail than the slides/log]), so it’s immensely satisfying to see that 6A has been thinking along the same lines (I’m not crazy!) and it’s great to see them implementing these advances on a larger scale, and totally getting it.

I’m super excited and have the highest hopes, especially if it gets rolled out as a platform that can work with others doing cool stuff (lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about data slicing/dimensionality and about digital-physical bridging in online community (duh)).