Lifestreaming vs. Blogging: Round 1
25 Jul '09
I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter lately around lifestreaming and blogging. Some say lifestreams are “killing” (ugh, I hate that word in this context) blogs, while others couldn’t care less about lifestreams. My opinion? Blogs are alive and well with the help of their friend, the lifestream.
A lifestream is an aggregation (or collection) of all your social networking activities. My lifestream is here. That’s where you can see in one place, what I’m tweeting, bookmarking, favoriting, yelping, stumbling, flickr’ing and reading, among other things. This particular lifestream is powered by Sweetcron, a self-hosted lifestream software. In order to use this software, you must have your own hosting service and be familiar with CSS as well as a little PHP. My lifestream is where you can see what I’m all about beyond my blog. It’s also a place where you can get a holistic view of who I am through the pictures I take, the videos I watch, the resources and sites I bookmark etc. All of the social networking sites I am active on are on this lifestream, except for Facebook. Only because I haven’t got around to writing the code. My lifestream is a one stop shop for all your Violet Mae needs.
On the other hand, this blog is where you can read in-depth about me, what I’m doing professionally, my thoughts on the marketing, new media, tech, web 2.0, social media industry. My blog is updated less frequently but the entries are thought out (sort of) and much longer than 140 characters. My blog is also a place where I can reflect, muse and ramble– it’s active and requires maintenance. Oppositely, my lifestream is passive and sits in the background but they both support each other in terms of shaping who I am online, what I do and what I’m all about.
Most people I know don’t have lifestreams. In fact, those I know who are not involved in tech or new media find it absolutely horrifying. “WHY would I want everyone to know what I do all over the internet? That’s like, stalker status!” Their very reaction tells me that lifestreaming is going to become very popular within the next one or two years– especially with the shift into real-time web.
In other words, blogging and lifestreaming are so different and each have their advantages and disadvantages. However, they work very well together and I don’t see how one is “killing” the other. As far as I’m concerned, they are both playing happily in the sandbox together.
Great post Violet. Nice breakdown of the difference between your blog and your Lifestream. I agree with you 100% about how Lifestreaming compliments a blog. I find them great for filling in the gaps between blog posts with useful content that doesn’t warrant a full writeup as well.
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the kind words. By the way, I often check out the gallery of lifestreams you have on your blog. They inspire me and one day I’ll get around to learning how to make my lifestream just as pretty
I do like the basic concept of lifestreaming and in fact also have SweetCron currently installed on my main site http://AlexTrup.com
What I’m finding though (and this is probably more due to my template than anything else, is that because I tweet more than anything else, all the other stuff is pushed away and looks a bit repetitive. Yours by comparison, is slightly more balanced, but I still think most people will be confused by the repetitive looking tweet boxes (I’m not singling you out, just a problem with the standard template/format of lifestreams in general).
I’ve seen some other templates which move the Tweets into a single block on the side, separate from the other elements, such as photos, videos and links etc. and think I may need to implement something like that.
Alternatively, it may be a case where I create a separate page for each feed or type of content rather than merging them all together… Essentially untangling my lifestream. I do already have some category filtering, but I’ve found this a bit limiting in Sweetcron.
Either way, I think I may move my lifestream to a subdomain/subdirectory of my site rather than the front page as I work to build my personal brand, through deeper blog posts and highlights of my career achievements etc. rather than every little thing I’m doing.
Just my thoughts and I do flip-flop between what’s best
Alex