On the Evolution of Blogging and the Role of Lifestreaming

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.