Today I was reading the latest issue of Wired. In it is an interview with Salon Cofounder Scott Rosenberg about his new book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters.

Rosenberg’s book researched the origins of blogging and goes on to discuss how it has become a phenomenon. Wired asks him several questions which include why did he need to write a book when a blog post would do which could have been followed with a rimshot. Other questions include whether he believes blogs have peaked, what impact Twitter has had, and what does he see the future of blogging becoming.

It is this last question that piqued my interest. Here’s the excerpt:

Wired: So what will blogging look like in 2019?

Rosenberg: The interesting outgrowth will be lifecasting. With traditional blogs, even if it’s easier to put stuff into a blog, you’re still selecting items. Lifecasting is an alternative where you’re pressing a button and recording everything.

Rosenberg uses the term Lifecasting which more often is used to describe broadcasting personal video but many people interchange the term Lifecasting and Lifestreaming and I’m gonna say he meant more than just video with his statement.

You can read the whole interview here.

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Yesterday I came across the Lifestream page of  Taddeo Zacchini who is a graphic designer for Squarespace where he states in the header

This is my lifestream page: a new feature that will soon be available to all Squarespace users. The whole world of social network in one place, completely customizable in all parts!

Taddeo isn’t the only only one that has been bitten by the Lifestreaming bug. Squarespace staffers Tyler Thompson and Eric Anderson have also created Lifestream pages (see below). I recently spotlighted Squarespace in one of my custom Lifestream galleries for a page they created where they aggregate the Twitter streams of several staff members (note they mention the new functionality coming on this page as well). They have also created a similar page for the staff of Revision3.

The only details I’ve been able to uncover regarding the new functionality they will be rolling out is from this post on Stephan Wetzl’s blog where he states

Squarespace will make soon a big update on V5 with releasing social widgets that let you aggregate data from across your various social networks completely within the Squarespace environment. This widgets let you create amazing Lifestream sites, so that your blog or website transforms to your personal social media hub.

When I first looked at how the Squarespace admin UI functioned I was pretty amazed. They also offer the ability to import data from existing blog platforms which include Wordpress, TypePad, Blogger and Movable Type allowing for a total transition. So with their upcoming functionality to create beautiful Lifestream designs, they should become a worthy new platform for anyone interested in creating a unique and custom Lifestream.

I’ll keep you posted on the release and will provide a full review once it becomes available.

Taddeo Zacchini Lifestream

Tyler Thompson Lifestream

Eric Anderson Lifestream

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I featured Tom Beardshaw in my last installment of the Custom Lifesstream Gallery. Tom is an avid Lifestreamer and recently did a presentation at an Ignite conference in Cardiff in the UK.

Ignite conferences are unique in that they offer a different format for presentations where you only have 20 slides that rotate every 15 seconds giving you only 5 minutes to engage and educate your audience. Tom did a presentation on Lifestreaming using this format and I think he did a pretty good job.

He has provided a video and slideshow of his presentation which I’ve only provided screenshots of below because you should visit his site to view them and get full details.

Visit Tom’s site to view these and if you know of any other good presentations on Lifestreaming, post them in the comments.

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Tonight I read over on SEO and Tech Daily that the Windows Live blog reported yesterday that they have now completed a rollout that has added a significant number of new sites that can now display web activities on your profile page.

You just need to visit http://profile.live.com/WebActivities/ to configure which ones you want to add. There are 20 new sites that have been added. Here’s a breakdown by category mentioned in the post:

• If you use a social networking service worldwide, you can add your updates from:
  Facebook, Twitter, Arto, Daum, Fotolog, Hevre, wow.ya.ru, Zoo
• If you share photos online you can now add updates to Windows Live from:
  Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugMug, Metroflog, Bilddagboken
• If you have a blog, you can add it to Windows Live from:
  Wordpress, LiveJournal, Typepad, Overblog, or the custom blog activity, which works with Blogger and others.
• If you use any of these sites for information, music, video, or radio service, you can add them to Windows Live:
  MSN, The Zune Social, iLike, Pandora, Last.fm, Dada, Dailymotion
• And if you use a variety of different review sites, you can add them to Windows Live from:
  Digg, Flixster, StumbleUpon, Tripit, Yelp

I’ve also provided a screenshot of my web activities page below

There are several other new features with this release including the ability to import contacts from Facebook, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Tagged. The display of the Lifestream itself unfortunately hasn’t been updated and is a bit bland utilizing only text descriptors. In either case I’m glad that Microsoft is still pushing forward and dedicating resources towards increasing the Lifestreaming efforts on the Windows Live service. I’m keeping an eye on them hoping they continue to improve.

Screenshot of my profile page

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Today marked a huge day at Facebook as they have decided to open up their data stream via API to developers. Another major development and a step to an open standard for Lifestreaming was the simultaneous announcement that Facebook was supporting Activity Streams.

Of course they didn’t totally open things up and ReadWriteWeb provided details on the reality of what exactly will flow through the stream. Even the LA Times joined the throngs of those criticizing Facebook challenging that they aren’t as open as Twitter and stating that much of data will continue to be private and maintained by them.

Anyways, even if things haven’t totally opened up I think this is a step in the right direction and hopefully is just the start of continued plans to break down their walled garden. TechCrunch provided a nice live Qik stream of the technology demos. You can view the videos of the event here.

So I got to thinking a little about the announcement and began to wonder about how people will be able to share their data outside of Facebook now that they are allowed to. I immediately thought about how by default your profile and all aspects are set to private. So even with this announcement, I’m fairly sure that people will need to manually opt-in to begin sharing their stream outside of Facebook.

I figured that many people may not know where they need to do this and what options they have so I decided to record a screencast providing some basic details on where these settings are and how you can change them.

Note video best watched in HD mode on YouTube

Update: Alison Driscoll has posted a many more details regarding the privacy settings including how to utilize lists to better control what you share. You can view the post here.

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