A few days ago, I wrote about blogs needing to be more social and embracing new personal web services and acting as hubs (or aggregation points) for our increasingly digital lives. Of course, for a majority, Facebook would do just fine. Mathew Ingram sums it up succinctly when he writes, “Blogging isn’t for everyone…For those who want more control over their online data and destiny…I think blogs and blog-based tools are the best route.”

One of the great things about Facebook is its newsfeed, a feature that was first introduced to me by Narendra Rocherolle, co-founder of 30Boxes, who first rolled out a newsfeed in his calendaring application.

During the course of working on GigaOM Daily, our experimental micro newsblog, we ended up developing GigaLogue, which can help turn your WordPress blog into a newsfeed very similar to the Facebook newsfeed (or any other newsfeed). We wanted to develop GigaOM Daily using Prologue, but in the end we came up with our own solution. A few points:

• Inspired by Prologue, we are releasing a template and plug-in set called GigaLogue.
• It will include the Twitter, RSS and email aggregation features.
• It will enable users to instantly create groups or communities around a variety of different content sources (notes from Twitter, images from Flickr, videos from Vodpod — basically anything that could go in a feed or an email).
• It will be released under a GPL license next week on dev.gigaom.com

Essentially we are using some of the more common and open technologies — nothing more important than RSS. Since this is being released in open source, we are hoping developers will write plug-ins that can add more social features into this theme. Others can develop plug-ins for sharing documents or calendaring information. Of course, there are thousands of WP plug-ins that can be retrofitted for this theme and take this in directions I can’t even imagine.

As I said at WordCamp, we are not a technology company. Instead we are a media startup that is using technology to figure out the future of our business, wherever it might head up. In the course of doing so, our tech team came up with GigaLogue. Big thanks to Chancey Mathews and Kyle Johnson, the quiet geniuses inside our little company. Thanks to them, expect more such experimental stuff from us soon!