Building a Lifestreaming Backchannel for the Ubuntu Developer Summit

I came across a post from Jorge Castro who is an Ubuntu enthusiast and works on the Ubuntu Community Team on External Developer Relations for Canonical Ltd. The post discusses the benefits of having users Lifestream during the conference to create a rich backchannel of information.

Image courtesy of Jorge Castro

Here’s a snippet:

And why do I care about this so much? Having been to a UDS and then missing a few and then going back there’s always this of “I’m missing something” when you are not at a UDS. Microblogging and all this other web2.0 nonsense really do a good job at giving you a feel for the “vibe” at an event. Sure, having live video and audio is preferred, but there’s something to be said about the backchannel “wow, I don’t want to say this aloud but Jono’s idea is pure crack” kind of conversations that make it much more fun. I think having a realtime feed of microblogs, blogs, pics, and other stuff is worth looking into …

You can read the rest of the post here and you can go grab the script they created specifically for the conference here and help them perfect it for use at their next conference.

This post got me thinking that this is a great vertical use of a Lifestream and a concept that is ripe for development to something akin to coveritlive.com Currently you would have to cobble together a filtered data stream based on hashtags and tags used in other services like Flickr, Delicious, etc. so coming up with something a little more straightforward and streamlined to pipe specific data in would be preferable. Such a tool could be used for Lifestreaming anything tied to a specific event as often current Tweets with embedded hashtags are. Just something to keep in mind if any of you have some free time and the inclination to build such a service