Next week from October 15th to the 17th I will be headed to Las Vegas to attend and cover BlogWorld Expo. I’m excited about this on several levels. In monitoring the buzz online leading up to the conference, I can see that a large number of folks that I follow and admire will be in attendance. I always look forward to connecting in person with the people I interact with online but rarely get to see.

There are quite a few panels that I’m looking forward to.  An obvious one is Lifestreaming & Your Business on Thursday the 15th at 1:30pm where Steve Rubel will no doubt be providing his knowledge and experience on how to utilize Lifestreaming tools and concepts effectively. Then on Friday at 11:30am the stars collide when so many speakers I enjoy will all be presenting at the same time. There’s Robert Scoble talking about social media changing news, Chris Pirillo discussing monetization methods for blogs, Louis Gray on technology and the real-time web, or Micah Baldwin and Jesse Stay on the wrong ways to use Twitter. I might be panel hopping to try and get some tidbits from each. There is plenty more I’m looking forward to but I’ll return with what I’ve found during and after the conference.

Then on October 27 & 28th the 140 Character Conference (known as 140Conf) makes its way to Los Angeles. This is a travelling conference that most recently appeared in New York and after Los Angeles it will be making its way to London.

Here’s how Jeff Pulver (its creator) describes it:

At the #140conf events, we look at twitter as a platform and as a language we speak. Over time it will neither be the only platform nor the only language. #140conf is not an event about  microblogging or the place where people share twitter “tips and techniques” but rather where we explore the effects of the real-time Internet on Business.

I will be speaking on day 1 with several some other people that share a passion for Lifestreaming much the way I do. They include Dan Honigman who inspired the Austin Statesman project and recently released a Lifestreaming white paper, Kevin Sablan whom I’ve watched leverage Lifestreaming and its tools to help tell stories and bring us news, and Mona Nomura who has effectively used Lifestreaming tools like FriendFeed, SweetCron, Twitter and others. I’m really looking forward to joining these three great people to both educate and provide several aspects of Lifestreaming.

A few weeks ago I read about Twitter Times on TechCrunch and it really piqued my curiosity. The service creates a custom news page for you based on the people you follow on Twitter. It also takes into account the people that your followers follow probably to provide some additional data to help the algorithm calculate the higher priority stories.

I recently wrote about understanding the value of Lifestreaming. In that post I discussed how I’m really looking forward to new apps and services that will provide curated content across the various services that I interact on based on my social graph. Get used to seeing the words “Curate” and “Social Graph” used pretty heavily in the year to come. I’m abusing those words and MG also mentioned them in his post.

Lifestreaming and other technologies have done a fantastic job allowing the masses generate an incredibly large amount of content very quickly. Filtering the noise is a common topic that is discussed as a problem that has resulted from this. The next evolution of Lifestreaming really needs to find ways to tackle this problem.

Which brings me back to Twitter Times. I signed up immediately after MG’s post and was lucky to recently have been provided access to the service. Look at the screenshot below from my latest issue.

Click image to view my current page

You can see that it provides a newspaper / magazine layout that lists all of the items. The items are prioritized based on the number of your followers that tweeted links to the item. The first column provides the “hot” items which appear to be more recent links with an image if available. The right column shows the top stories for a larger range of time. Overall I think this is a great service. It allows me to not worry so much about monitoring my Twitter stream for fear I might miss something. I can just leisurely pull up this page at my convenience and see what the people I follow have found interesting.

I’m sure some people may say that Google Reader is now a good platform for this with their new social features. But unfortunately the barriers are a little higher for that to be effective. It requires you to build a large group of friends on there that will also actively use the service to share items from their feeds. I just don’t see it becoming as effective as Twitter Times which gains it’s content in an arguably more effective way by tapping Twitter.

That said there are definitely some tweaks that would be nice. MG pointed out that Kevin Marks had asked if they could omit links that are sent out by us which makes sense. I would also like to see an RSS feed for the data provided so I can view it in list form if I wanted. Some more interesting tweaks would be to build custom pages based on my Twitter user lists (once that feature goes public). Also if I could add higher weight to certain people I follow. In any case this is a great effort and I continue to look forward to many more apps that take this approach to other services such as Flickr, YouTube, Delicious and the like. And if they do it from all services on one page, well then we have a curated Social Stream. I can dream right?

The Twitter Times – Video Tour from Maxim Grinev on Vimeo.

Over the last couple of years I have seen my fair share of critics that post negative commentary about Lifestreaming. I feel that this is due to a narrow-minded view of what it is. This in part is due to the misconception that Lifestreaming is only about personal narcissm and vanity. Sure, that’s a part of it, but it goes far beyond that. There is so much negativity centered around the all too common stereotypes perpetuated by people who continually tweet about eating a sandwich. This alone has provided much of the cannon fodder for many to quip about the uselessness of Lifestraming. That behavior prompts many to state why the hell would would they want to follow any normal person’s life. Well I find most “normal” people I follow to be far more interesting than most celebrities that put their life on display nowadays, but that’s a different post.

In the sandwich example, there are many ways to add pizazz to that tweet such as incorporating external services that add context. If more folks did this, then it might help remove that negative stereotype but unfortunately I don’t think that lame tweet poster boy is going anywhere anytime soon. The bottom line is many will continue this behavior and…that’s ok. But providing personal details about our lives is only one aspect of a well balanced Lifestream. Sure it’s nice to provide that insight for others to learn more about us as a person, but there is so much other content and value that we can provide in our Lifesteams.

Spicing up a tweet linked to a service to add context and richer information

For most of the people who’s Lifestreams I follow, gaining insight from their personal posts is only part of the value. The other half of the equation is from all the content they highlight for me. So it’s the collection of the best content out there being curated by my social graph that provides value for me. So if we utilize these tools to share what we find and like as well as what we create, our Lifestreams become much more powerful.  Over time as we find the people who share the same topics and interests as we do, we build an amazingly powerful content network. That is the other half of what make Lifestreams so powerful that many fail to understand.

Examples of methods you can share to provide value in your Lifestream

• Sharing bookmarks using Delicious
• Favoriting videos on YouTube
• Reviews of restaurants on Yelp
• Checking into locations on Brightkite
• Adding movies to your queue on Netflix
• Reviewing books on Goodreads
• Post an informative tweet or share any of the above using Twitter

Robert Scoble wrote an interesting post recently that discusses the need to find better tools to allow us to curate our own Lifestreams. He states that we need to make it easier for people to incorporate photos, videos, audio to help tell our stories. I agree. There are currently several ways to Lifestream using services and platforms I cover here but for the most part it requires some knowledge and work. We haven’t quite lowered the bar far enough to penetrate the mainstream yet. Facebook is probably the simplest one stop shop at this point and finding a way to keep things simple and integrated like them would be the goal.

I left a comment on Robert’s post about an interface that my friend Kevin Sablan has mocked up to provide such functionality for curation across multiple media and services for news. But I also discussed that just as important as simplifying the tools to create the content for our Lifestreams, I see the ability for mining the data generated from them being just as important. This is something I’m very excited to see coming in the future and here’s an excerpt from my comment on Robert’s post:

But I also see a 3rd option in the functionality of curation that I would also like to see. An automated method to provide curated content across my various services that is built using my social graph (or followers on each of those services) If I could also tweak the dials to optimize it as well that would be even better. For instance it would be something like the FriendFeed best of day except more intelligent. For instance it could aggregate all the links sent out by my Twitter followers on a daily basis prioritized in descending order by how many of them tweeted the link and then perhaps even take it a step further by categorizing them by types of links. (e.g. blog post, video, photo) and perhaps even broken down by category.

The smart algorithms to curate content to help me filter and digest information from the firehose intelligently and help me not miss things is the main thing I’m looking for nowadays.

Writing about this subject has been simmering within me for quite some time. It was this post by Justin Clark which finally triggered the inspiration for me to finally write about this.

Here is what Justin said:

Lifestreaming is a trend that is only beginning to catch on. The potential of lifestreaming is huge. The problem is that most people have a tainted view of what lifestreaming is. The common perception is that lifestreaming is just a bunch of pictures, text and video broadcasting a person’s day to day life online; while it can be used like that, you’d better have a pretty interesting life if you want anyone to visit your site.

A lifestream can be so much more. A lifestream should be a collection of thoughts, ideas, opinions and more published online utilizing various media formats. The more people use online services like Posterous and Tumblr this way, the more valuable content will be available on the web. People will be more likely so post short thoughts and opinions that normal blogs would not be able/willing to post.

Lifestreaming adds a whole new level of value to the internet. I hope more people will use and embrace it.

I have a feeling that Justin is going to be a great Lifestreamer.

Previously to reading Justin’s post I had come across this post by Amy Mengel titled “Why are we all screaming for Lifestreaming“. She was asking how does Lifestreaming fit in between a blog and Twitter. This sparked a good conversation in the comments. While reading them I still continued to see the negative stereotypes that I read in so many other places, but the conversation was engaging. I decided to chime in on the conversation and bring my thoughts in.

So I just covered on some of the value I get from other’s Lifestreams but for some that may not be enough of an incentive to create one on their own. Well there are plenty of other reasons to create a Lifestream as well and I’m sure plenty more to come. I think it will continue to take time both for more people to begin Lifestreaming as well as people understanding the value of it. Ultimately it will fall upon tools that make it easier to do and add value as well as evangelists banging the drum for it to continue to make its way into more people’s lives.

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.

Over the last few months Twitter (or the technology of micro-blogging) has marched its way to penetrate the mainstream and just like any new web technology that does this, we see a much wider base of users and then come the spammers. Even prior to this phenomenon there was a race to gain followers. Many felt that having a large number of followers would equate to being considered an “authority” and that messaging sent by these users would carry more weight. While in some cases that could be true, I feel that this is now more the exception than the rule.

This behavior seems to also have spread to other services  such as FriendFeed and Facebook causing a huge followfest along with the blaring volume of messages that accompany being at a huge party. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, but with this new behavior comes the need to find a way to manage how to still effectively listen to the people that matter to you. Luckily there are quite a few tools that allow us to do this fairly effectively by creating lists of people that we can filter by.

For Twitter we luckily have the two most popular tools both supporting lists in Tweetdeck and Seesmic. below I have screenshots of where those lists reside in each of the programs.

(click for larger screenshots of Tweetdeck & Seesmic list functionality)

The same ability to create lists is also available in both FriendFeed and Facebook now as well

(click for larger screenshots of FriendFeed & Facebook list functionality)

This post isn’t to show you how to setup lists in each of these tools but I will provide links to help you at the end of the post. So why am I showing you all of this? Because having a humongous follower count brings with it a tidal wave of data. It is becoming pretty clear that being followed alone isn’t enough anymore. If you want to be heard I think it’s going to become increasingly important to make it onto people’s lists.

A few months back I read a great post by Mike Fruchter titled My State of Social Media. In it Mike talks about the race to gain followers and states that “Lists are now the tool of choice for fake following”. While I disagree and feel that list management can be used in a way to follow a larger audience, it does glean perspective on whether or not people who follow you nowadays are listening.

Many folks cite the Dunbar number which states that you can really only effectively follow about 150 people. Others have chosen different approaches and just decided to clean house which is what Robert Scoble recently did by deleting all of his followers and starting from scratch again. Louis Gray found Robert’s tactic to be the wrong approach and provided insight as to why in his post to Jump on the massive unfollowing trend would be a mistake. Louis has shown me how he manages users on FriendFeed and he is a list managment ninja.  As you can tell by the way I’ve configured my tools and services I side more with Louis and also read about how Marshall Kirkpatrick manages people. Sure it takes quite a bit more work to have to create multiple lists and categorize people into them, but I feel it provides a  much more effective way to be able to make sure you can listen to them.

So how can you determine if or how well you are being heard? Well there are several good analytics tools that can help you figure that out. If you use a short URL service that offers the ability to see if people are actually clicking on the links you are sending out. I’m a fan of bit.ly which not only tells you how many clicks you got, but where they came from and over what period of time.

(referring sites from Google Analytics)

I can also find out if people are listening to me on various services when I send out notifications about new posts by looking at data in my web analytics program. I use Google Analytics but any of them will provide the info by looking at the referrer data.

Another fun thing that you can do with referrer data that I’ve only been able to glean from the traffic coming from FriendFeed is how people label you on their lists. Below is an image with a breakdown of 30 lists that people have placed me on where they clicked on my links to visit this blog. It has been interesting, enlightening and funny to see how some people have decided to classify me. This alone I believe provides pretty good evidence that I’m getting traffic specifically because people where able to find my links once they filtered my posts on their lists. There’s a good chance that otherwise, they may have never seen my posts come through their stream.

I think that the behavior of creating lists to filter people will continue to become a tactic used by many and as this continues to happen it will become important to make your way onto them or just get lost in their main stream.

(the lists that people have put me on FriendFeed)

Here’s a few links to help you learn about list management with the tools I discussed:

• FriendFeed – Managing the FriendFeed Stream
• Facebook – How to use Facebook’s Lists
• Tweetdeck – The Groups help page
• Seesmic – Hands on with Seesmic Desktop