By Steve Dorrington
In the context of the internet, a lifestream (or Life Stream) is a time-ordered stream of documents/posts/pictures/videos that functions as a diary of your electronic life. A big word I could use is chronological, but I won't. I prefer 'time-ordered stream'. When you use social bookmarking or social networking you can capture what, where and when you said it as you say it. Well not say, I mean type.
In a nutshell - every document you create, every photo or video you post and every comment you make is stored in your lifestream - last ones shown first. Your past is at the end of your lifestream. Some people even take it as far as to start off with the tail of their stream containing their electronic birth certificate. This I won't be doing. That is taking it a bit too far I guess.
Moving away from the tail (or the starting point) and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents - papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software, scripts, micro-blogs, statuses) are all stored in between.
Some lifestreams move beyond the present and into the future, the stream would contain documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists. When I was typing this article in Microsoft Word (my word processor of choice) it kept telling me that it wasn't in the dictionary. Guess what? I will be soon! Life Stream, it has a nice ring to it. Just like streams flowing down a hill or mountain, so does your life stream on and on.
I started my lifestream quite recently. I capture all my inputs and outputs from twitter, jaiku. ping.fm, friendfeed, facebook, my blogs (on several topics), youtube (my videos and my favorites), flickr, delicious, digg etc etc.
I'm using a brand spanking new script (now in public beta) called Sweetcron. It's not easy to set up and a bit too fiddly for most at the moment, but it will be great. It is almost like having your own self hosted friendster. The backend (guts) of the script or the engine is Codeigniter - that is how I found it in the first place.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fingers for typing this article without too many errors considering they have been in use all day. Because I like Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - I'm very interested to see how it does in the search engines too. It appears to do nice search friendly URLs. I've thought of some really good ideas based on lifestreaming and I'll adopt those as my marketing develops.
I find the whole concept of being captured in time to be very exciting. My site will eventually be crawled by search engines, hopefully bringing traffic to my sites, then subsequently the web archive. In about 6 months my life will be totally documented and a snapshot taken for prosperity ;-)
Wish me luck.
Onward and upwards...
Want to know why I blog? Go Google CarpetDog - then you will find out why!
Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog) My Lifestream at www.stevendorrington.com Marketing to the next level at We Buy Kidneys
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