This morning I was reading on louisgray.com: Web 2.0 and Democratization of Data – Say What? and on problogger.net: Home Bases and Outposts – How I use Social Media in My Blogging about how there are just so many different ways to publish and share content online. From louisgray.com today:
New sites and services are popping up every month. Established, major Social Networks such as MySpace and or Facebook are adding features, functions, and tools encouraging users to share data. The way Social Networks will be used are changing. There are millions of active users like us, sharing our personal stories, the latest news, information pertaining to our professional life, or even stupid cat photos since we – the users, have the choice and control to share whatever we feel is important to share. The bottomline: Information is no longer consolidated, centralized, or coming from a few selected sources. Data is now and will only continue to be democratized.
If you’ve been following me for some time now you know I’m a fan of trying to pull this stuff together into a strategy. You don’t need to be blogging for blogging sake or twittering for the sake of twittering. I do because I want to learn how these tools fit into an overall web strategy to help others be more effective online.
I was talking to a friend the other day about this and told her to think of me as a carpenter or builder – you tell me what kind of house you want, I’ll figure out what tools are best to use.
One of the ways I’ve been experimenting lately has been a concept called ‘lifestreaming’. It’s where I am able to take all of the items I want to publish or share and aggregate them into one place. One characteristic of this is that each item then has equal weight and that can be troublsome as I don’t feel that a funny video I favorite on YouTube should carry the same voice I want this post to carry. But in a lifestream, that’s what you get.
Lifestreaming is still a little young and not quite where I really want it to be yet. I’ve actually sketched out what I think would be a more perfect solution with lifestreaming but I don’t have the technical know-how to make it happen. But for now it’s a great tool to help pull a more complete picture of yourself together.
If you want to follow my lifestream, at this point you have a couple of options. One is FriendFeed, the other is soup.io. I’ve tried to make it easier for you though by providing the last 30 items of my lifestream on orangejack.com/lifestream.
I do, however, think this is a step in the right direction.
