You Say Lifestreaming is Bollocks and I Call Bullshit

By
Mark Krynsky
– July 8, 2009Posted in: Commentary
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bullshit1PR 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.

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About Mark Krynsky

I created Lifestream Blog and hope you enjoy the site. I'm always looking for contributors so contact me if you're interested. You can follow the rest of what I like to write about at my personal site or follow me on Twitter or Facebook