Reducing oneself to a cultural stereotype 

I was thinking about how OPML would be perfect for resumes. When you were applying for a job, you'd send in your OPML file. With the right kind of search tool, an employer could aggregate the files of competing candidates and ferret out the important bits. When you got the job, the employer would include your outline in a master employee list, which would become the organization's itemized intellectual capital database. Wouldn't it be great for places like consulting firms? I've worked at PR firms where they try to keep data on staff experience with different kinds of accounts and verticals, but it always breaks down for want of maintenance; you need an easy way to keep it up.

Then I got to thinking, a resume is a chronological list, a lot like the community car roll. If you were to look at a car list and a job list together, you'd start to get a pretty good picture of who a person is. Then if you added a home roll you could size up a person to an even greater extent. Toss in a blogroll, a favorite movies list (or NetFlix queue) and favorite book list (or an Amazon wish list), and there you have a person in a little collapsible nugget. We might not need FBI checks for federal appointments anymore, or Supreme Court nominee hearings.

(Kind of kidding about that part, but, hey, if your interest rate for a car loan is based on your credit report, how is that so different? Of course it would have to be all voluntary. If it wasn't, it would be as bad as those comprehensive South African identity cards during Apartheid when the info was used to limit liberties. I finished re-reading Michener's The Covenant. Don't tell anybody I read Michener; it would ruin my reputation. ;-) But seriously, doesn't it tell you something about me that George Eliot and James Michener co-exist on my nightstand?)

And think of the possibilities for matchmaking; a service probably could develop a compatibility score based on the number of intersections. But the real value would be in letting the prospective date scan a person's lists to get a snapshot of a background and life.

If attention right now is (mostly) about what you do online, then lists of cars, jobs, abodes and books are about who you are, and when those lists are aggregated, they're about the historical, cultural and social nature of groups. Right? Or am I full of turkey baloney again?