Image courtesy of Flickr user Colin Purrington

Several events as of late have cause many folks to celebrate a resurgence in blogs. The events of FriendFeed being purchased by Facebook and the demise of Tr.im (although it was resurected) have everyone questioning their trust in storing data on services controlled by others. Chris Saad shouts that Blogs are back. I recently chimed in on the need to maintain blogs and providng reminders of others who have deemed blogging dead and shown us the future of blogging. I completely agree with Louis Gray, Robert Scoble and many others that our blogs should always be our main hub but they also need to evolve with the changes that have transpired with the advent of Social Media services and the real time web.

While I enjoy providing my Lifestream on services like FriendFeed and Facebook to engage and communicate around my items on those services, I also have a Lifestream at the same time on my personal blog. All my entries get stored neatly in my Wordpress database with the help of the wonderful Lifestram plugin. Along with hosting your own Lifestream on a blog there are tons of widgets available from social media sites that can help enhance your blog as well. Lastly, the use of a commenting service such as Disqus or Echo provide a method of aggregating all the discussions around your posts to be displayed on your blog. These are just a few high level examples of how you can evolve your blog. There are many other methods out there, with plenty more to come. You can get many great visualizations of how people are doing this today by visiting the galleries.

My favorite post on this subject though comes from Om Malik who wrote the aptly titled post “The Evolution of Blogging” where he provides much more context around this shift, why it needs to happen, and specifically mentions Lifestreaming.

From his post

What Facebook and FriendFeed have shown is that people want to consume and publish content in a more dynamic fashion — more in real time, so to speak.

I will quote from a previous post. “As a society, we are entering an increasingly narcissistic phase, enabled by web technologies…The evolution of blogging platforms needs to match these societal and demographic changes.” What I meant was that blogging platforms need to evolve from the hierarchical content-management systems of today to more fluid, free-flowing, more socially relevant and real-time lifestreaming systems.

It was nice to hear Om on TWiT last week where he discussed many of his thoughts from the blog post. You want to go to 57:13 of the podcast to hear him talk specifically about how blogging needs to evolve. I’m excited to see the emphasis go back to blogging platforms to enhance their features to take advantage of Lifestraeming and social services in new and meaningful ways. I look forward to watching this happen.

Below is video of a presentation from DrupalCamp Dallas in which Randall Knutson provided insight into what Lifestreaming is and then shows how to create one using Drupal. The method Randall uses to create a Lifestream in Drupal is by using the Feed API module. Coincidentally I too have spent a good deal of time recently implementing this module for the X PRIZE website and also did a quick talk on it at the LA Drupal meeting this month (video should be available in the future).

The video is just shy of an hour and unfortunately the camera is focused on Randall as opposed to the projector which he appears to be using to show much of the process. Still it is worth listening to if you are interested in learning more about Lifestreaming and Drupal.

Randall also created a slide presentation which is available on Google Docs here.

While Feed API is a very powerful and flexible module, there is a simpler alternative for creating a Lifestream using Drupal. Be sure to also look at the Activity Stream Module written by Adam Kalsey which was designed specifically to create a Lifestream. It comes with support for a slew of services out of the box with the ability to create additional ones as well. Below is a screencast that shows how to install, configure, and use the module.

I have noticed a recent surge in users starting to use and adopt Posterous. One of the biggest reasons for this was the proclamation by Steve Rubel that he was killing his blog in favor of Lifestreaming and choosing to use Posterous as his new platform. As a result Steve has become the poster boy for Posterous (pun intended) attracting many people to try the service. His move caused a huge reaction on the web, some of which wasn’t positive. In a recent interview with Posteruous founder Sachin Argawal, he also acknowledged Steve’s use of Lifestreaming as a term that best describes his service.  I recently met Steve and told him that while I was happy he had brought huge attention to Lifestreaming, I believe that many people are confused by the term. My hope is to try and clarify some of that confusion here.

First off,  I’m not the Lifestram Nazi dictating what method you should use to create and populate your Lifestream. However, the concept that I cover is primarily as a way to aggregate the content we create or like on a multitude of services into a central location. To that point I wanted to show how Posterous is positioned with that method of Lifestreaming. Below I have provided what should hopefully be a clear diagram showing the differences between Posterous and the Lifestreeaming method I described.

Using the Lifestreaming method you post to various web services and then aggregate the content generated at each of them on your Lifestream. Your Lifestream can be located at a service like FriendFeed, Storytlr or many others, or it can be self hosted using Wordpress, SweetCron or many other options as well.

Posterous uses a different methodology in which you post all your content to their service first via email, bookmarklet, or a custom form and then optionally autopost that content to external services such as Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, and Youtube. The options for posting by email are flexible and powerful. You can specify which of the external services you want to autopost to on a per email basis by using  specific settings.

One of the biggest differences gleaned from these 2 methods is that a Lifestream allows the ability to publish from a limitless number of external sources that provide either an RSS feed or access via API whereas Posterous is limited by whatever can be published using their tools. For example, if I decide to “love” a track on Last.fm or add a book I’m reading at Goodreads, those actions can be automatically setup to publish to my Lifestream. In those examples I can use the native tools on the respective site to publish content to my Lifestream without having to do anything special. It would require me to take an extra step to do the same on Posterous. So basically Posterous is limited to the content you publish using their tools because they don’t offer the ability to import content from external sources. Until they offer this, I don’t consider them as a true Lifestreaming service. By the way, I see this as one of the key differentiators between Posterous and Tumblr which it is often compared to.

Now that just explains the differences in methodologies. It’s not to say that one couldn’t effectively use Posterous as a Lifestream or even find ways to incorporate generating content at external sites in a meaningful way on Posterous. In fact, many people are doing just that. I just wanted to bring some clarity to the differeces as I see them.  I have been enjoying using Posterous and find its posting and workflow options to be very powerful. There is a lot more to the service as well than just what I’ve covered here. Also,  I have discovered some great content that is being generated on the service and have started to follow some very interesting users on there and see a great community forming. I will definitely continue to play with and watch the service evolve.

Gordon Bell’s name came up several times when I first began researching Lifestreaming back in early ‘07. While I consider David Galernter to be the “Father of Lifestreaming“, Gordon has done his fair share of work early on that also has helped with the concept. I’ve written about him in the past and quoted an interview done with him in the New Yorker from May 2007. Gordon preferred the term “Lifelogging” and His early work on the MyLifeBits project at Microsoft where he collected information and stats on all sorts of content while finding best methods to catalog it, has no doubt helped set the stage for what we call Lifestreaming.

This month’s Wired has some details regarding Gordon’s work and mentions a new book he has released titled Total Recall that covers the research he’s done with regards to MyLifeBits. Below is an excerpt from the article.
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Image courtesy of Wired & Nicholas Felton

Over the course of a lifetime, humans take in more information and memories than their brains can handle. Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell believes this to be a bug, not a feature…Bell has been compulsively scanning, capturing, and logging each and every bit of personal data he generates in his daily life.

This trove includes Web sites he’s visited (221,173), photos taken (56,282), emails sent and received (156,041), docs written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by the SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). To collect all this information, he uses a staggering assortment of hardware: desktop scanner, digicam, heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone, e-reader.

Visit Wired to read the full article.

A while back I had read about several Wordpress plugins that offered the ability to customize the viewing of your site for mobile devices. Yesterday I decided to go research the slew of plugins available out there to determine which one to implement. I reduced the field to 2 plugins. The MobilePress plugin and the WP Touch plugin. I liked the straightforward and simple approach offered by MobilePress, but then after playing with WP Touch, I decided that I like the larger number of options and ways to customize the features.

There are many options available for WP Touch Wordpress plugin that make it a great one to offer a clean mobile version for your website. This plugin was designed specifically for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android devices although it appears other mobile devices are supported. I’m not sure how the site renders on other devices so perhaps you can leave a comment if you try it to let me know. Once enabled, the display of the site on an iPhone looks really clean and offered some nice features. One of those which I really liked was the ability to offer a custom icon which is placed next to the title and can be displayed on your home screen as well for an iPhone or iPod Touch. They provide a link to a great iPhone icon generator which I used to create one for Lifestream Blog. You also have the ability to add more custom icons or choose from a slew of existing ones they provide for each of your sites’ pages that you choose to make available in the navigation.

Also regarding the icon functionality, you can choose which pages you want to make visible in a nice custom dropdown menu available just to the right of the title. You can also offer an RSS feed and link to the email address you setup on the Wordpress admin. The posts have several fields you can choose to display and offer a nice ajax dropdown for each of them that displays an excerpt with a link to view the full post.

One thing you need to make sure is that you follow the steps to properly configure WP Cache or WP Super Cache if you are running either of these plugins so that you’re site works properly. I was running WP Cache and had issues and then finally moved over to WP Super Cache which seems to offer better support for mobile devices.

Here’s screenshots showing the extensive settings available

Here’s a video showing some features on Lifestream Blog on my iPhone

Here’s a list of the notable features listed from the plugin page

• User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
• iPhone-like application appearance, functions
• AJAX, jQuery & effects in only 56kb
• The ability to turn advanced javascript effects & ajax on/off
• Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
• Theme native social bookmarking support
• iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
• Ajax comments, posted in real time
• Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
• Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
• Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
• Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
• Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
• Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
• Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
• Favicon fetch & conversion to .png for links displayed using the WP blogroll
• Support for FlickrRSS plugin, Blip.it video plugin
• Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
• Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)
• Automatic Links page layout with your blogroll links listed with their favicons (if you have or create a page called ‘Links’)