About

Updated 1/21/18

This site provides information to help you mange your personal data in many ways. Learn about how to generate personal data across many aspects of your life and then how to capture and organize it. Also covered are details around how protect your data and make sure you are prepared by providing ways that loved ones can access it after you die. You will also learn how analyzing personal data can help improve your life. Below are details about how this site was born and expanded information about the areas it covers.

You can contact me as well.

What is a Lifestream?

In 2007 I was looking for a way to aggregate data I published to multiple services like Twitter, YouTube, Delicious and others in a single online location in reverse chronological order. I did research and found that several people had also been working on doing the same thing. After learning how to do it, I wrote about my original goals and shared the resources I found. I began thinking about all the amazing possibilities a lifestream could offer to enhance our lives and my passion inspired me to create this blog.

The original Lifestream concept originated in 1996 as a project at Yale by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter. They described it as “a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life”. Here is an interview with David Gelernter where he provides more insight. David wrote a book on the subject titled Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean.
Another concept that goes hand-in-hand with lifestreaming is lifelogging.

What is Lifelogging and the Quantified Self?

Lifelogging was a concept pioneered by Gordon Bell as part of his MyLifeBits project which aimed to capture all personal data in digital form and create software that allowed the ability to search and review it. In recent years new devices such as smartphones, activity trackers and more have allowed us to capture many new personal data that can all be stored in a lifelog. The Quantified Self is a concept that was created around finding ways to analyze lifelogs to help optimize and improve our lives. I’ve created a list of devices, services, and resources for lifelogging and the quantified self here. You can also watch Gordon describe Lifelogging at a quantified self meetup. You can find more resources by visiting this section of the site. I also highly recommend reading Gordon’s book Your Life, Uploaded: The Digital Way to Better Memory, Health, and Productivity

What is a Digital Legacy?

Digital legacy is the idea of preserving our personal digital data (photographs, journals, documents or other data) for the future and after we die. There are several aspects to this which include storing all of our data in a central location with a backup plan, finding ways to present and search through our data, and coming up with a plan to enable someone to inherit our personal data. You can learn more in the Digital Legacy section of this site. To understand aspects of Digital Legacy based on our past and the future I recommend reading a book by Richard Banks titled The Future of Looking Back.

How to Create a Lifestream

1. Start by defining the services you want to use to create your Lifestream. The services listed on that page offer the ability to track our activities such as bookmarking  (Delicious), listening to music  (Last.fm),  sharing photos (Flickr), or creating or liking videos (YouTube).You may already have accounts on existing sites, or want to create new ones.

2. Determine how you want to create your Lifestream. I recommend starting with one of the many available services and then once you get the hang of it you can add one to your personal site or blog.

Here are some more helpful posts to get you started

Here are great resources on the web

57 Comments

  10. […] As we create content across the internet, whether it’s twittering and tumbling, uploading photos, recording bookmarks, or blogging, it becomes increasingly valuable to have a way to aggregate all our content in one place. Lifestreaming is an answer to this need for a coherent and unified presentation of our online lives. A Lifestream grabs the RSS feeds we create at most sites we participate at and collects them on one page in chronological order, allowing a quick look at everything we are doing online. “What is a Lifestream? In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. … Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take), etc.” via Lifestream Blog […]

  14. […] Lifestreaming might perhaps be described as a variation of microblogging, and has the same focus on brevity of content. The key difference is that while with microblogging you write messages directly within the application itself – as you might send a text message – with lifestreaming applications you aggregate your other content from around the web and compile it into a single stream of short bites of information. […]

  15. […] μου – με τα λεγόμενα και τις δραστηριότητές μου. Το Lifestream blog προσπαθεί να δώσει ένα ορισμό της ονομασίας: What is a […]

  18. […] not a fan of Tumblr. At the moment I use it for a partial life stream (a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline – thanks Krynsky). It is just publishing a feed of several of my blogs. It a very limited public […]

  19. […] with me? Ahem, good — I’m also introducing otrops elsewhere. This is effectively my lifestream. I don’t really like the term. Mostly because my on-line existence is only a portion of my […]

  25. […] Lifestreaming might perhaps be described as a variation of microblogging, and has the same focus on brevity of content. The key difference is that while with microblogging you write messages directly within the application itself – as you might send a text message – with lifestreaming applications you aggregate your other content from around the web and compile it into a single stream of short bites of information. […]

  30. […] Anyway, prompted in part by a story that UK police will soon have cameras in their helmets, Damien raises important questions about a world where our privacy is invaded – not so much by state surveillance or corporate cctv, which we all now recognise, tolerate, even accept (so the helmet cams are little more than portable cctv) – as by each other, as others post photos of us to flickr (or other photo sharing sites), or videos of us to YouTube (or other video sharing sites), or all this and much much more on bebo (or other social networking sites), to say nothing of what we reveal about others in the blogosphere. It is now more than technically possible for people to broadcast the details of their daily lives in various ways (I learned a new word Friday; Damien says this is called lifestreaming). […]

  46. I am such a newbie and sponging up as much of this as I can. I have a wp blog and am trying to incorporate this. May need a little, ok a lot of help. Will be following closely… hoping maybe you work for hire as well. It may end up there LOL

  47. […] As we create content across the internet, whether it’s twittering and tumbling, uploading photos, recording bookmarks, or blogging, it becomes increasingly valuable to have a way to aggregate all our content in one place. Lifestreaming is an answer to this need for a coherent and unified presentation of our online lives. A Lifestream grabs the RSS feeds we create at most sites we participate at and collects them on one page in chronological order, allowing a quick look at everything we are doing online. “What is a Lifestream? In it’s simplest form it’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. … Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take), etc.” via Lifestream Blog […]

  52. […] – sorted by timestamps – and create one big stream of activity. Very similar to LifeStream or what is going on on a Facebook Wall, yet less annoying, more selective and of course prettier. […]

  57. […] with me? Ahem, good — I’m also introducing otrops elsewhere. This is effectively my lifestream. I don’t really like the term. Mostly because my on-line existence is only a portion of my […]

Comments are closed.