Violet Mae Lim

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 (I promise this will change) 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 (more on this topic at a later date).

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.