A sampling of references/influences/thought-starters for those interested in talking about this:

• Marc Canter: Marc is all over Free Media Management (n??e Open Media Management) – Free Media Management, Virtual File mngt vs generic Media Management, Jon hits a home run! (identity issues), Intro to an Open Standards Architecture
• Les Orchard of 0xDECAFBAD: PersonalWebProxy
• IBM Research: Web Intermediaries (WBI) – “Intermediaries create smart pipes” (they’ve got a whiteboard picture, too, and also prettier pictures showing the architecture and some scenarios)
• Abe Fettig: HEP Message Server
• Yutaka Sato: DeleGate: an application-level gateway/proxy with “transcoding” capabilities and origin (client) capabilities – see DeleGate: A Universal Application Level Gateway
• The Intelligent Software Agents Lab: WebMate from Carnegie Mellon (“a personal digital assistant, is a promising solution to the problem of finding useful information among a sea of texts and other web documents”)
• Matt Griffith: Jog, the personal Google & Wayback Machine
• P.A.W. @ SourceForge: The Pro-Active Webfilter is a filtering HTTP proxy based on Sun’s Brazil framework
• Phil Wolff of a klog apart: Comments on microcontent and converged clients in From .blog to converged client
• Anil Dash: Introducing the Microcontent Client
• S??bastien Paquet: Part 2 of Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research (here is Part 1)
• OSAF: Chandler, of course…
• Eastgate Systems Inc.: Storyspace
• The SpaceMapper Project: MN8 and DataStore
• KnownSpace: KnownSpace Helium
• evectors: RssDistiller
• Ticluse Teknologi: The Snewp
• D. J. Adams: Tinkering with RSS and NNTP (Adams is also the author of Programming Jabber – I’ve got my copy and Jabber is in the tool…)