Lately the echo chamber of the blogosphere inhabited by the Gillmor Gang (of which I am a member) has been caught in a loop of Twitter-FriendFeed convulsions.

Steve Gillmor believes that Twitter is the communications medium of the future. Send out a message to your followers and track (when the feature is enabled) the loosely coupled conversation as it wafts deeper into the cloud. FriendFeed, on the other hand, aggregates feeds from Twitter and many other sources, creating an index of the content (gestures in Gillmorspeak) an individual chooses to share with followers.

Twitter’s friendly API allows applications to be built on top of it (when the site is up), letting FriendFeed and other services tap into the Twitter stream. In addition, FriendFeed allows users to comment on the contents of the aggregated feeds and has “rooms” for discussions among a group of people.

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The echo chamber of the blogosphere is concerned about too much refactored content and a lack of original thought in the raging river of blog posts flowing into feed readers and Web crawlers (see Techmeme). There are many worse problems in the world than what is sometimes unpleasantly called blogorrhea. You could be a blogger in China dancing around government censorship. Internet and Web 2.0 technologies have allowed anyone to be a writer, publisher, and pundit just by clicking the publish button. Along with the flood of interesting and insightful content comes the boring and feckless.

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Mozilla is expanding its browser platform into new realms, creating APIs and a portable storehouse for bookmarks, customizations, passwords, histories, preferences and other metadata.

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