I’m feeling quite the urge to aggregate and list the various incarnations of me that exist across the web. I have several home pages, blogs, memberships in rental/rating sites (like Netflix and GoodReads), information networks (better descriptor for Google and MSN/Live?), photo sites, and IM protocols.

Home pages are evolving into just such an aggregation, it seems. Since data is strewn across different networks and servers, but is readily available and backed up by those immense and professional services, why duplicate the information on a local server? Why not simply hotlink? That’s what the web is, right? It’s come full circle, except blue underlined text is replaced with super-mini-logo-icons.

You’ve seen them, you know what I mean. They’re up there, next to the URL in your location bar. Only now those itty bitty logos are popping up as identifiers for linking to and from those popular, immense, professional services.

I suppose the only reason to duplicate one’s data in this scenario would be for backup purposes. Because, really, what will it take to make Google (Picasa, Blogspot), Yahoo! (Flickr), LiveJournal, or the rest unavailable? What would it really take to wipe out the data that’s scattered all over the net for each of us?

In aggregating these links, are we making it too easy to be tracked onilne?