Salmon, an aggregation protocol, is championed by Google’s John Panzer, and described as an “an open, simple, standards-based solution” for “unifying the conversations”.

‘Conversations’ is deliberately plural, I think, to evoke the many conversations, invisible to one another: “The comments, ratings, and annotations increasingly happen at the aggregator and are invisible to the original source.”

Using Salmon, an aggregator pushes comments back to a “Salmon endpoint” (via POST). These can be published (or moderated) upstream at the original source. See also the summary of the Salmon protocol.

Comments swimming upstream…

In a post at ZDNet, Dion Hinchcliffe delineates 7 problems of today’s social web:

Fragmentation of conversation.

Disconnects between older and newer generations of social media

Lack of control of identity, contacts, and data.

A better social Web on mobile devices.

Poor integration between social media and location services.

Difficulty of coherently engaging in social activity across many channels.

Coping with and getting value from the expanding information volume of social media.

from “The social Web in 2010: The emerging standards and technologies to watch” encountered via Ed H. Chi’s post at the PARC Augmented Social Cognition blog.

The trends? Openness, portability, aggregation of distributed content. Hopefully we’ll see more on all these fronts in 2010 and beyond. Hinchcliffe also suggests that we want “Better social and location capabilities added to the core of mobile devices.”

See the full post at ZDNet for more discussion and references to a number of standards, formats, and related developments. In the next post, I’ll highlight Salmon, a protocol for distributed commenting, which I’d neither encountered nor heard of.