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A few nights ago, I was watching Stephen Colbert and a singer called Feist came on. I’d never heard of her, but thought she was interesting. That thought led me to remember way back when friends of mine and I were into Marilyn Manson. I remember one friend who would call me and say "Dude, Manson is going to be on the ____ show tonight."

When you’re a big fan of an artist, an actor, or even a sports team, you could just go to their website and find out where they will be, when, etc. But that takes an active search by a fan. And once you get that info, what do you do with it? Do you mark it on your calendar? Subscribe to the RSS feed? Get an email alert?

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could hear an artist on the radio, see someone on TV, or read about someone and be able to "subscribe" to them in one place? Imagine if you could click "subscribe" on a web page, on iTunes, on your TV remote, etc., and you’d then be given an options screen. Let’s say you’re really into Radiohead. You click subscribe, and you get the following options as checkboxes:

• Concerts
• New Music
• New Videos
• Solo Projects
• News
• TV Appearances
• Articles
• Blog Posts

You’d check off whatever you’d like to hear about, then you could change settings to receive alerts in whatever way you want. New Music- That can go directly to your iTunes account. New Videos- How about YouTube or whatever other service you use? News, blog posts and Articles can go right in your RSS reader.

Now, I realize this idea rests on a couple of factors:

1. Categorization would need to be strict and static- Let’s extend the band idea. Each band would need to have a unique identifier as would each alert category. I just envision it as a lookup.

2. You’d need some kind of authority- The unique identifier for each band would need to be both public and un-spoof-able. If I were trying to promote a small band at a local bar, I shouldn’t be able to add U2 as a warmup act. There would need to be a way to make sure that the people that actually represent U2 verify the posting.

There are more, but those are the two biggies I can think of offhand.

Let’s back up a bit now. I started off with a very specific, detailed example, but now let me go back to the general idea. Wouldn’t it be great to have data completely separated from the services that touch the data? And wouldn’t it be nice if we could really be able to manage our data "subscriptions"? 

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