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.

I have recently decided to seriously spend some time focusing on how to improve my Lifestreaming workflow.  I have found that creating an effective workflow is one of the most challenging aspects of Lifestreaming. I don’t feel my current method is very good and needed to change. There are many variables that will determine your workflow. Which tools & services you use to create content (Flickr, YouTube, iPhone) as well as the networks you post them to (Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter) will dictate many things.

Here are my plans and goals.

• Identify all my current desktop & mobile tools currently used to post content
• Look at how content is currently displayed on the services I’m posting to
• Review my cross-post and sync methods across all my existing services
• Modify the tools or processes currently in place making them more effective and eliminating duplication

So the catalyst for me getting this process started was posting photos from my iPhone. I no longer wanted to use Twitpic. I currently sync my twitter account to Facebook. I want my mobile photos to be displayed as thumbnails in my Facebook feed as opposed to tweets with a Twitpic link. FriendFeed displays the Twitpics fine, but I want the best solution across all services.

I’ve been doing a little research on the various services out there that do cross-posting including Pixelpipe, Ping.fm, and Tarpipe. After some testing I’ve started to experiment with Posterous’ auto-posting features. So far I’m pretty happy but have issues with duplication based on my current workflow.

Steve Rubel’s Lifestreaming Workflow

Then the other day I noticed that Tweets from Steve Rubel are using the FriendFeed short url service yet are linking to his Posterous. So I went back to read his Lifestreaming Workflow post. In it he gave the overview on how he captures, processes, and shares content but not the nitty gritty details. Luckily a commenter posed a question that prompted Steve to provide the details I was looking for.

Steve’s secret sauce

That information helped me understand how he was doing it. I’m not a fan of relying on RSS to get scooped up because I like the immediacy of posting but it got me thinking differently about how to improve my workflow. I’m willing to make sacrifices to my workflow to remove duplicity and RSS is quickly improving around the needs of the real-time web so it may not be an issue in many cases.

Anyways, I will continue testing and improving my workflow and will post the results once I have reached a comfortable process I decide to use. In the meantime I would love to hear about your current methods and possibly include them in my future post. Either leave details in the comments or you can email info to me.

I’ve been covering several of the new Lifestreaming features that have been coming to the AIM desktop client and web client and today it appears that AIM Lifestreaming has landed on the iPhone.

Here is what Appadvice had to say

AIM now features all kinds of new ways to interact with your friends and family via Lifestream.  When you first launch the app, you will notice the addition of the Lifestream tab at the bottom of the screen.  When accessed, it will allow you to set up an account through Safari if you haven’t already.  Lifestream is able to pull in updates from other services, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Digg, so you won’t have to jump from app to app to keep in touch.  You can also comment on those status updates from the app, view photos, and even filter through the content to find exactly what you are looking for.

Image courtesy of Appadvice
Of note is that there are 2 versions of the AIM app for the iPhone. A free ad supported version which does not yet have Lifestreaming functionality or the $2.99 version without ads that does. No word on when the free one will be adding Lifestreaming.

I found out about this from Steve Rubel who has posted some of his thoughts on the release as well.

I have noticed a recent surge in users starting to use and adopt Posterous. One of the biggest reasons for this was the proclamation by Steve Rubel that he was killing his blog in favor of Lifestreaming and choosing to use Posterous as his new platform. As a result Steve has become the poster boy for Posterous (pun intended) attracting many people to try the service. His move caused a huge reaction on the web, some of which wasn’t positive. In a recent interview with Posteruous founder Sachin Argawal, he also acknowledged Steve’s use of Lifestreaming as a term that best describes his service.  I recently met Steve and told him that while I was happy he had brought huge attention to Lifestreaming, I believe that many people are confused by the term. My hope is to try and clarify some of that confusion here.

First off,  I’m not the Lifestram Nazi dictating what method you should use to create and populate your Lifestream. However, the concept that I cover is primarily as a way to aggregate the content we create or like on a multitude of services into a central location. To that point I wanted to show how Posterous is positioned with that method of Lifestreaming. Below I have provided what should hopefully be a clear diagram showing the differences between Posterous and the Lifestreeaming method I described.

Using the Lifestreaming method you post to various web services and then aggregate the content generated at each of them on your Lifestream. Your Lifestream can be located at a service like FriendFeed, Storytlr or many others, or it can be self hosted using Wordpress, SweetCron or many other options as well.

Posterous uses a different methodology in which you post all your content to their service first via email, bookmarklet, or a custom form and then optionally autopost that content to external services such as Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, and Youtube. The options for posting by email are flexible and powerful. You can specify which of the external services you want to autopost to on a per email basis by using  specific settings.

One of the biggest differences gleaned from these 2 methods is that a Lifestream allows the ability to publish from a limitless number of external sources that provide either an RSS feed or access via API whereas Posterous is limited by whatever can be published using their tools. For example, if I decide to “love” a track on Last.fm or add a book I’m reading at Goodreads, those actions can be automatically setup to publish to my Lifestream. In those examples I can use the native tools on the respective site to publish content to my Lifestream without having to do anything special. It would require me to take an extra step to do the same on Posterous. So basically Posterous is limited to the content you publish using their tools because they don’t offer the ability to import content from external sources. Until they offer this, I don’t consider them as a true Lifestreaming service. By the way, I see this as one of the key differentiators between Posterous and Tumblr which it is often compared to.

Now that just explains the differences in methodologies. It’s not to say that one couldn’t effectively use Posterous as a Lifestream or even find ways to incorporate generating content at external sites in a meaningful way on Posterous. In fact, many people are doing just that. I just wanted to bring some clarity to the differeces as I see them.  I have been enjoying using Posterous and find its posting and workflow options to be very powerful. There is a lot more to the service as well than just what I’ve covered here. Also,  I have discovered some great content that is being generated on the service and have started to follow some very interesting users on there and see a great community forming. I will definitely continue to play with and watch the service evolve.

PR Blogger Stephen Waddington wrote a post where he denounces Lifestreaming. Stephen isn’t the first person to bash Lifestreaming. I see plenty of comments on the web that paint Lifestreaming in a negative way. Stephen just happens to be the catalyst that finally triggered me to write a post about it.

Here’s a quote from Stephen’s post:

Lifestreaming is dull. Most people simply don’t have interesting enough lives. At best it’s a sequential record of random events recorded in a sentence or an image. To claim its anything else misses the point…my stream of images is boring as hell. But I make no apologies. It’s a personal record and it’s not intended to engage.

Really? Who made you the definitive authority on what Lifestreaming is and how it should be used? And who do you choose to call out negatively as the poster boys for Lifestreaming? Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel. Really? You couldn’t have picked two worse examples to try and make your point.

Sure there are many that use Lifestreaming to simply post the personal actions that occur in one’s own life and it’s perfectly fine if that’s how they choose to do it. But there are also many people that choose to weave in links to media and content that is associated with their line of work or interests they have. They do this both to alert followers as well as engage them. By identifying these valuable people, and building a list of them to follow, you in turn create an incredibly powerful human curated content stream. Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel epitomize this class of users whose Lifestreams I follow and to condemn them for it is ridiculous.

Stephen also goes on to say the following:

Likewise Stuart Bruce says blogging – not lifestreaming – is the way forward if you want to develop thought leadership. He makes the point that blogs are far more Google friendly than micro-blogs.

Oh puhleeze, as if the 90’s web was better than what we have today and using these new tools diminishes thought leadership.

The real-time web is upon us and with it comes the ability and tools to push out bite sized chunks of content. Utilizing these methods in conjunction with long form blog posts is an essential way to get your message and expertise across today. If you choose to ignore Lifestreaming concepts and don’t evolve and embrace these new methods you will surely become an afterthought during the next phase of the web.

Lifestreaming is a term that doesn’t adequately describe the complex concept of aggregating content, manipulating it, and packaging it for presentation. Hopefully people will begin to look beyond the most common stereotypyped usage of them to realize the many different beneficial ways they can be utilized.