I discovered a new open source Lifestreaming platform written in Django that comes to us from Krzysztof Klinikowski of Poland.

He describes it as

Lifestreaming Platform, multilanguage and multiuser. Written in Django, using modern technologies, microformats friendly. Clean and beautiful.

Here is a screenshot of a user profile (click to visit)

This is an alpha release but you can download the code from Github and he has a demo version running here. You can read more about Krzysztof’s other projects and contact him here.

TWiT is one of my favorite Podcasts and I listen to it every week. Leo and several of his guests have discussed Lifestreaming quite a few times on the show. A while back Om Malik discussed how blogs need to evolve and how Lifestreaming will play a role in this.

Another recent show had Natalie Del Conte and Jason Calacanis on and at about 30:10 of the show they began a discussion in which Leo surfaced Gordon Bell’s name (happening all over the place lately it seems) and talked about his Lifelogging research with regards to personal monitoring. They mentioned the Fitbit which is just one of many new devices that are coming out with the ability to track health and fitness data which can be used as way to monitor our own wellness within a Lifestream.

I recently wrote both about Gordon as well as this new personal logging revolution that has begun with the proliferation of all these new devices. While the aggregation of social media was the catalyst for Lifestreaming, I think the ability to have wearable devices that can passively monitor and collect data about us will be one of many new enhancements coming in the near future.

CNN released 2 stories on Lifestreaming this week. The first is titled “Do digital diaries mess up your brain?” written by Elizabeth Landau which provides some very interesting information with regards to Lifestreaming. It begins providing some background about Gordon Bell and the Sensecam which will finally be released soon. But the story goes on to also discuss how the current suite of services including Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter are now providing additional opportunities to stream our lives. Then the story takes a bit of a different turn

If we rely on technology for documenting, sorting and storing information — creating digital diaries, or “lifestreaming” — what will become of our minds? Although there is not a lot of research on this subject, psychologists have a range of opinions about where we’re headed.

It goes on to talk about the effects on the brain and how learning to use the technologies that allow us to Lifestream offer an important way to keep the mind stimulated much like puzzles. The future is discussed where it may be possible to do most of this using a microchip implanted in the brain. Another positive effect of Lifestreaming could offer is extending the cognitive life of Alzheimer’s patients by 10 years by presenting them with their own memories.

But there are some more insightful effects that can be negative that are pointed out. This particular paragraph provided me with some introspection regarding how I’ve been affected by my personal Lifestreaming.

But recording everything you do takes people out of the “here and now,” psychologists say. Constant documenting may make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they’re doing because they are focused on the recording process, Schwartz said. Moreover, if these documented memories are available to others, people may actually do things differently.

This statement offers a pretty big revelation that I’m personally guilty of and have witnessed in others. Sarah Perez wrote a great story earlier this year precisely about this issue asking if “we’re forgetting to live”. I recently went to see U2 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and this was the epitome of what the story discussed. My eyes circled the rows in front of me and all around during the show where I viewed an overwhelming number of people who were glued to their cell phones sending out updates. I too was doing this mostly to send out photos through my stream but I was conscious of the phenomenon ocurring and really tried to limit my time spent doing this so I could enjoy the show. One guy in front of me spent the whole show recording a video of it on his digital compact camera…doh!

The second part of that paragraph is also very interesting. I can totally see how we may modify our behavior at an event specifically because of how we want to be perceived or be a character in the conversation that will make its way to Twitter and other social networks. The story provides quite a good read and I highly recommend you go read it.

The second story was titled “My week of recording a digital memory” written by John D. Sutter in which he took on the role of creating what I’d consider a pretty extreme version of a Lifestream where he attempted to record everything he did using either video or audio.

Be sure to click on the boxes in this image when you visit the story to get clips of John’s experiment

I personally think this goes too far, and John came to the same conclusion, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless. He also discussed how the process interfered  and caused him to miss ‘living’ but did see value in being able to “store and curate a digital memory of highlights”.

He goes on to detail his process and gives tips along the way such as keeping video clips short, record what you can store, and try to track one thing at a time. That last tip was in reference to his desire to being able to glean something about his health, reading patterns, sleep cycles or work efficiency as part of the experiment. The problem was that by tracking all of those at once, he felt scatter-brained and states that focusing on one activity would have offered more insight.

Not only did CNN cover Lifestreaming with these 2 stories, but they also recorded a video segment which I’ve provided below where both Elizabeth and John are interviewed about their stories and experience.

These were 2 very well done stories on Lifestreaming that I really enjoyed and look forward to more such pieces that delve deeper into Lifestreaming coming from other more mainstream media outlets in the future.

I was surprised when I looked at the online schedule of day 2 of the 140Conf because I saw a talk on there for MySpace on “The Future of the Lifestream”. I hadn’t seen it before so my guess is that it was a last minute add on. I was impressed as this was now the second talk at 140Conf on Lifestreaming (The panel I was on presented the previous day).

Monica Keller speaks to the crowd at the Kodak Theater for the 140Conf (more photos below)

To cut right to the chase, Monica Keller of MySpace was showing their Activity Streams implementation. Activity Streams is an extension to the Atom format that was designed to store the format and information that could be used for a Lifestream. I was probably the most excited person in the Kodak Theater for this talk. I have been following the Activity Streams initiative since its inception and had heard about MySpace adopting it but this was the first time I got to see the goods and get full details behind it.

Here’s a short clip I recorded from Monica’s talk

Mike Jones who is now the COO of MySpace spoke prior to Monica and he spent quite a bit of time emphasizing the importance of the (Life)Stream. He even stated that “The stream is the flowing blood of a social network”. So it seems like MySpace gets it. They understand that providing a central presence for an open platform that facilitates the sharing of content created outside of their service is crucial to their success.

I was able to speak to Monica for a little while after her talk and discussed some more specifics about what they’re working on. I believe she told me that they expect to roll out Lifestreaming to all users this year, but I haven’t been able to get her to confirm this via email prior to this post.

Now I think everyone sees the elephant in the room and knows that MySpace has quite an uphill battle to regain all the users that its been hemorrhaging to Facebook but their Lifestreaming implementation may be able to help them retain and possibly get some users back depending on how well it’s implemented. Facebook’s implementation for allowing you to import services is limited, fairly hidden and not very good.

I really am looking forward to watching MySpace push this envelope helping bust the dam of data that is necessary to get all social networks to compete on the same playing field. I for one am definitely paying attention to MySpace now and will watch how this plays out over the next few months.

Photos from the talk. Full set on Flickr here

I think it was about a year ago when I saw the first literal music video. This is when a new singer dubs words for exactly what is happening in an existing music video set to the same song. It’s actually pretty funny and you can find a batch of some of the best ones here.

So you’re asking what the hell does that have to do with Lifestreaming right? Well tonight I saw a new Motorola Cliq commercial that really caught my attention because it took the approach of showing what amounted to a literal Lifestream. I won’t explain it because I’ve embedded the video below.

While not the same premise as the music videos I found the correlation interesting nonetheless and a good excuse to share the music videos. A little over a month ago I wrote about the announcement of the Motorola Cliq and now it’s been released. You can learn more on their new site here where they have a video that specifically states ”see your entire Life in a single Stream”. They also seem to have a simulator available that you can play with.

I haven’t followed much more beyond this information on the Motorola Cliq but it’s the first Android powered phone by them and their implementation looks nice and definitely has a strong emphasis on Lifestreaming so it’s probably worth checking out. I’m hoping to run across someone who has one soon so I can play with it.