Lifestreaming: The New Future of Blogging?

Erin Blaskie

www.ErinBlaskie.com www.bsetc.ca

Lifestreaming: What is it?

• Lifestreaming is a continual broadcast of events in a person's life through digital media.

• Lifestreaming is the act of aggregating many streams, generally using a third party service that then shows the content in chronological order.

Lifestreaming: Why?

• People are feeling the “need” to utilize all of these different sites but there is no automation or system to it.

• Building a lifestream creates order in the midst of real life chaos.

Lifestreaming: Why?

• Provides readers with a snapshot of the blogger’s life providing a much more in-depth look into what they are doing, reading and listening to.

• Allows blogger to share things quickly, easily and effectively with readers.

Lifestream: Incoming Data

Incoming: What am I listening to?

Incoming:What am I reading?

Incoming:What am I browsing online?

Incoming:Where am I traveling?

Incoming:What am I shooting

via video?

Incoming:What am I taking pictures of?

The Mobile Generation

• Incoming information needs to also be portable, mobile and easily addable to your lifestream.

• In this next diagram, an iPhone is being used as the basis due to the sheer number of apps.

The Mobile Approach

Outgoing Information

• Once the information comes in to the blog, you need to syndicate it out to the various feeds / websites you belong to.

• This is known as notifying your tribes that you’ve done a new action (also known as enabling stalkers to keep tabs on you…)

Lifestream Style Plug-Ins for WP

• Lifestream - Pulls in data from many sources and produces a grid-like image of your updates.

• My TwitPic’s - Displays recently uploaded pictures to TwitPic.com.

• Sociable - Automatically adds links to favorite social bookmarking / networking sites.

• Tweetly Updater - Posts a notice to Twitter when you update your blog.

External Widgets Added to Sidebar

• Ustream video embed code.

• TripIt ‘upcoming trips’ embed code.

• Twitter widget.

• Blip.fm widget.

• Shelfari ‘currently reading’ embed code.

Anatomy of the Lifestream

Anatomy of the Lifestream

Anatomy of the Lifestream

Why Could This Be the Future of Blogging?

• We’re sharing so much information that we need systems / automation to save time.

• People are finding amazing things through the act of sharing - this allows that to happen in a one to many scenario.

Choices

• We all have a choice as to how much we share.

• We all can make choices about our open life experience.

• Choose something that fits for you and create your tribes in an authentic way.

Closing Ideas

• We need to come up with a balanced approach to this and ensure people know that they can turn the volume up or down to suit their life.

• By making people more transparent, do we open up a positive outlook on lives or do we open up negative possibilities?

Learn More & Questions

• www.LifeStreamInColor.com (Life Stream)

• www.BSETC.ca (Business)

• @ErinBlaskie (Twitter)