Unleashing remix and distribution

Riffrolls on music and  linkrolls on kittens
Bright Flickr badges and warm wool on AdSense
Amazon book lists tied up with strings
These are the things of our blog sidebar bling

Vimeo ponies and current IM status
Mail me and Skype me and Word of Blog, too
Indeed jobs flying with the moon on their wings
These are the things of our blog sidebar bling

Well, you know, just a little something for the kids...    but there's a point here.

We've become very accustumed to thinking of "distribution" of web services as little sidebar widgets.  And the results are kind of underwhelming, to be honest.

People don't go to my page to actually consume any of these services.  Its more for me to display things that I'm interested in, almost like little pieces of flair.

That concept falls far short of the potential of the remix world we're building.  Too small.

And then we have APIs, too.  Nice if you're a programmer, but for the rest of us, too geeky.

But what if I could paste some code right in the middle of my page and get a fullblown service right here on my blog.

Or, what about a dating blog for single parents?  Wouldn't they be interested in a fully functioning rendition of Match or whatever services are out there that is limited to single parent listings?  So it would look entirely like Match and have all the same features, but be skinned under my banner.

I was thinking about local portals the other day and how complicated it would be to set something up, but what if I could just pull down some HTML and start pasting together services.  I could have a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn site that lists Bay Ridge personals, all the Bay Ridge MySpacers, Bay Ridge City Search results, Meetups in Bay Ridge, Bay Ridge jobs from Indeed, a full explorable rendition of Flickr just from people in the Bay Ridge Zip Code... etc, etc.

Someone else could do the same thing for some other locality, or even for something besides location.  Goth personals, Goth meetups, Goth jobs?, Goth reblogs.

The key is that it should all be completely self serve.  I shouldn't have to strike a business deal with Nerve.com to want to feature Brooklyn personals on my blog... it should just be completely self serve.  All I'd need to do is to create the banner, do my own marketing, etc... and boom, I've got my own instant portal.

Right now, you need to use stuff like Drupal to create a site, use APIs, etc... its not something the average person can do.

And Squidoo has mods, but the mods are mostly text links via on RSS.... no fully interactive services.

If you have any kind of a consumer facing service, I think its to your benefit to allow consumers to pull down and promote a limited version of your site tailored to their vertical.  Let your users aggregate enough long tail stuff to appeal to a market segment you'll never reach on your main site.  So, instead of making me pick out and paste all the individual Amazon books on Brooklyn, let me skin a version of Amazon with Brooklyn books only that I can use right here on my site.... a pasteable bookstore.

That's remixing and that's true distribution.