There is currently a contest that has been launched called 48 hours in Denmark calling out users to displaying their Lifestreaming skills using multiple services including YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and blogging.

Here’s a few details from the site

Basically we’re offering you a free trip to Denmark, with all expenses paid. Plane, hotel, food and fun. What’s the catch? We want you to show us how you use digital media when you travel as a tourist. We want you to tell us how you’ve researched the trip, how you use digital media while you are here, and how you share your experiences when you get home. Anything goes, as long as it has got something to do with digital media. We expect blogging, twittering, lifestreaming and flickring to come together – maybe even some services we haven’t heard about. (When discussing the project on your blog, twitter og vlog please use the tag #48hoursindk – this way we can track the chatter!)

They have a questions page and when asked about what the Lifestreaming examples should contain I found this answer provided

just show of how brilliant you are at using social media. Creative videos with good ideas are of course preferred

So who is behind this and why are they doing it?

It appears to have been an idea created by Danish consultants Seismonaut, for the Midtjysk Turisme, a Danish tourism agency. Their goal is to better understand how the tech savvy use digital media when travelling and what it means for the tourist industry.

This sounds like an interesting opportunity for someone who has become an avid Lifestreamer to show their skills and win a nice trip to boot. I’m sure many readers of this blog would make perfect candidates to win such an opportunity. So get out there and apply for this and if you do, please provide updates here in the comments during the process.  Once they narrow the entrants to 10, they will provide online voting to select the winners and readers here would surely love to help you win.

A new Air app for Lifestreaming was launched today called Skimmer. I’ve only played with it for a short while but it has a pretty diverse set of features. It can import your feeds from several services including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and blog.

It will import status updates and allow you to reply and post both to Twitter and Facebook separately. You can also filter all your imported feed data by keyword, service, or friends lists from the main interface. There are 3 different types of views available for the feed which offer some unique differences from other clients I have used.

There are also dedicated interfaces for your Flickr and YouTube accounts that are presented in a great looking interface. In fact the interface and presentation throughout is one of the things that makes this app standout. Besides allowing you to view your imported photos and videos, the app offers the ability to upload to Flickr and YouTube as well with a fancy drag and drop interface.

Probably the most unique and gorgeous feature as well is the profile mode which creates an awesome content mashup of your data that you can customize and even embed as a widget on your own blog. This feature alone is worth the price of admission. So as you can see the app is pretty different and offers a combination of features that I haven’t seen before.

I only skimmed the surface (pun intended) and I really need to dig in more. There is already quite a bit of coverage on the app which I have linked to below. I just wanted to provide some quick info. In my short time with the app I recommend you download now and check it out. Well worth it just to play with the different and wonderful interface.

Read about Skimmer elsewhere

• Skimmer brings your social streams to the desktop – Webware
• Skimmer: Visual Desktop App for Tracking Your Favorite Social Sites – Mashable
• Skimmer Brings a Sleek New Look to Social Browsing – ReadWriteWeb
• Fallon Launches ‘Life-streaming’ Tool – AdWeek

This is the first guest post from reader Trae Blain. You can visit his site at traeblain.com. If you are interested in writing a guest post, just head on over to the contact page

In a sea of lifestreaming services, UnHub tries to distinguish itself from the other services by offer a simple portal into your online life. UnHub is a brand new player to the lifestreaming market that started out of inspiration from the Skittle’s brand experiment that used social media websites as its primary website.

The Gist

Unlike other lifestreaming services out there that aggregate your data into one common place, UnHub simply adds an iframe bar above all your online services with links that point to the services you add. Anyone can create an account—for anybody. Here’s Barack Obama’s UnHub as well as My (Trae Blain) UnHub. The service is extremely lightweight since it does not actually grab any of your data, but merely points people to the location of that data.

TechCrunch points out that this is a great tool for businesses that participate in social media, as illustrated in this Josie’s Restaurant Unhub. Personal and business use will also be fond of the simple analytics feature that is included with the service to see what links are clicked and what links nobody cares about.

In Practice

Usage is fairly easy. It asks you what services you use and what are the links to the profiles for those services. UnHub appears to support a large number of services (which would be expected with a service with such little overhead), 57 in fact. After creating an account you are asked for an email and password to associate with the account which allows you to view the Analytics feature. Each UnHub address requires a landing page to start with, and can easily be selected with the Home check box.

UnHub also allows for the selection of websites outside of the supported 57, although those sites won’t include a favicon in the top bar. UnHub is a nice service that can be leveraged by people/companies that want to use something like Twitter searches or any number of personal sites for their UnHub group.

Not all Peachy

UnHub does have its set of issues. Due to Twitters setup, UnHub does not work directly with it. Instead it substitutes Tweetree for Twitter updates profile viewing. Tweetree has a nice interface, but it’s not Twitter and could turn heavy Twitter users off to its use. Also, there’s no way to style your UnHub Bar. My UnHub uses a meager 15 services (only 26% of the ones offered) and the bar tends to push the other service’s content under the crease, Especially on low resolution monitors. Also, adding new services can be a chore. The “supported” services do not simply ask for your username and then it finds the appropriate link, the actual url must be entered into the form. Remembering some of these and tracking them down can sometimes be a pain. Also after the initial setup, you can only add one service at a time. It would be much easier to add multiple links before having to save the page.

To Sum it Up

UnHub offers a nice service that I believe many people would prefer in things like email signatures. UnHub provides the benefit of sending people directly to the content’s location (save Twitter), instead of aggregating it all into one place. It is a different approach to lifestreaming that some will find preferable over other methods commonly used today.

Everyone in the college world is focused on basketball so I thought it would be a good time to tell you about a course on Lifestreaming currently being taught by Dr Thomas Ho at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis. You can find the course description and objectives here where you can see that 25% of the course grading is based on contributions made via students Lifestreams.

The course is about helping guide students to use social media and other services to help build a “personal brand”. What I also found interesting is that not only are the students levaraging the services but so is the professor. He has created a Twitter account for the course and has encouraged the students to use a specific hashtag to help students identify and filter contributions for the course.

A blog has also been created for the course using Tumblr where students can leave comments discussing posts. Lastly, a FriendFeed room has been created that aggregates these and several other feeds from services used for the course. One of the feeds available is for an audio podcast of the courses. This is a nice addition that lets you take a peek into the activity between students and professor of the course.

I saw over at Woo Themes that they have recently released the Irresistible premium Wordpress theme for FREE. This theme took 4th place of the top 10 themes selected from a contest that Woo Themes ran last year. The designer, Izuddin Helmi also won 1st place with another submission.

This theme caught my eye very quickly as it is both styled and has functionality specifically catered to a Lifestreamer. I thought this theme looked so great that I had to try it out and write a review.

Before I get into the details take a look at the screenshot of the theme below after I installed it and plugged in all my data.

Click for a cleaner image

Not sure you feel the same way I do, but this theme struck me immediately as being really nice visually and breaking out the content in a unique way that I really hadn’t seen before. I feel it’s a clean fresh look that works well to bring your Lifestream to a blog. The image above shows the custom homepage option which provides small excerpts from blog posts and includes the Lifestreaming components. There is also another traditional homepage you can set it to use that displays full posts with images and utilizes a standard single sidebar on the right.

So now I’ll get into the setup and options. After copying over the theme and selecting it you have several things you need to configure to get your homepage and content setup properly. There is a dedicated options page to make this a pretty simple process. The myPhotos section is pulled in by providing your Flickr user account information. Flickr appears to be the only service supported for this section. myLifestream requires that you install and configure the great Lifestream Wordpress plugin by David Cramer available here. You have the ability to set the number of items you want displayed on the homepage for blog posts, photos, and Lifestream items. The myVideos section has a unique way of pulling in your latest videos. Simply create a new post and copy the embed code into a custom field that is added by the theme and then simply use the tag video which sets a flag for it to be placed on the homepage. Unlike photos, you don’t have to define a specific service and it appears to support many different video services.

So beyond all the Lifestreaming options I just pointed out, there are some other great features included in the theme options:

• There is support for 9 different color schemes all controlled via a dropdown that simply selects a different CSS file to use. The colors include blue, brown, gray, green, pink, purple, red, teal, and yellow
• You have a dedicated field to create an about section which appears on the home page with a link to read more on a dedicated page
• You can use a custom logo
• You can provide the code for your Google Analytics and Feedburner accounts
• A section for placing ad or other banners on your site
• A sidebar widget that pulls in latest posts and comments and displays a tag cloud
• …and several other options to tweak the theme

3 of the 9 total color schemes available

As if that wasn’t enough you also get the full PSD file that has an extensive breakdown of all elements used so you can customize the design even further if you wish to. I have to say that this is the most impressive Lifestreaming theme I have seen or Wordpress yet and I’m tempted to use it for my personal site despite the fact I just spent a ton of time customizing another one I switched to recently. I highly recommend taking a look and tinkering with this theme to see if it may be right for you.

You can get all the details and download the Irresistible theme on the Woo Themes site here and get a live demo here.