Month: June 2009

Life is but a stream?

So last week Edelman PR maven Steve Rubel announced that he was shutting down his longstanding blog, Micro Persuasion, and jumping feet-first into “lifestreaming.”

His new site, the Steve Rubel Lifestream, looks a lot like a blog to me. But he assures me that it isn’t.

Why the switcheroo? As he explains in his farewell post at Micro Persuasion:

Blogging feels old. Publishing today is all about The Flow. Posterous, my new home, feels more like flow and where the web is going so it’s time for me to do the same with my publishing, which will become daily once again!

You may be asking yourself, What exactly is a lifestream?

According to the “about” section of Lifestream Blog (heh), 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.” The Lifestream Blog (chortle) offers links to all manner of social sites that can serve as tributaries to your very own lifestream. If you take pictures, there’s Flickr, SmugMug, Photobucket (no mention of Twitpic, but it could count, too). Video? YouTube, Vimeo and the like. Add social bookmarking, micro-blogging (Twitter, etc.), geo-locating, book-sharing, music-sharing, event-sharing and so on, and before you know it, your stream becomes a flood of information.

It seems that twitter and Facebook already facilitate a lot of that lifestreaming Rubel is pushing. As does Tumblr and Rubel’s platform of choice, Posterous. (Colin Fast — @cfast on Twitter — is the first one to tell me about Posterous, in a comment in my June 11 blog post about the next big thing.) The funny thing about Posterous, though, is that it looks a lot like a blog — with comments, date stamps, etc. When you click on a specific entry, it even gives you a link titled “back to blog” to click to take you back to the main page. It may be easier to feed information to — I haven’t poked around with it yet, so I don’t know — but the interface is very familiar for the end-user.

I see where Rubel is going with this, though. In his latest — um, post? stream? — he differentiates the lifestream from the blog.

“For my purposes,” he writes, “a lifestream is really a thought-stream consisting of insights, links, videos, photos and more.” He describes it as a “digital equivalent of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks.”

Da Vinci recorded notes, drawings, questions and more in his notebooks. Some of these were quite mundane (grocery lists and doodles), others were not. But the body of work was over time, a view of a one individual’s mind (in his case a great one).

My lifestream is not the same. But but the model is. I promise you that if you join me for the journey, we will learn about emerging technology trends together through links, images, video and audio. The difference though between this and a blog is that you will be right there with me as learn about and process new information, doodle about it in my online journal and and share/express my observations in real-time.

So, maybe the lifestream is the next big thing I was thinking about a few weeks ago. I’m just not sure I’m ready to go with the flow yet.

Talking Heads – Take Me to the River (Live)

Friday Five: the Jackson Five

I’ll admit it: I was never a huge Michael Jackson fan. Thriller didn’t thrill me, like it did the millions who made it one of the best-selling albums of all time.

So Thursday’s news of MJ’s death at age 50 didn’t affect me in the same way as, say, the 2002 death of the Clash’s Joe Strummer, who also had heart failure at age 50. (I even went so far as to write a tribute to Joe, who was one of my musical heroes.)

But I came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, and unless you were confined to a gulag in Siberia, you knew about Michael Jackson.

You knew his music. You tried to moonwalk. You sang along with “Billie Jean” or “Bad.” You learned to dance the “Thriller” dance. You watched from the sidelines as the media chronicled his devolution from artistic genius to one-man walking tabloid freak show.

I prefer to remember Michael as the musician who performed some truly terrific pop tunes — first with his brothers in the Jackson 5, then as a solo artist. In his prime, he fused funk, R&B, disco and rock influences and churned out some great music.

I may not have been Michael’s biggest fan, but I did appreciate some of his work. Let’s remember him for his great contribution to the world of pop music.

Here is my personal Jackson 5 — my favorite songs from the King of Pop himself. Enjoy.

  • I Want You Back – The Jackson 5. With a young Michael singing lead vocals.
  • Rock With You. A classic from MJ’s disco/funk phase.
  • Wanna Be Startin’ Something. My all-time favorite MJ tune. Danceable, infectious beat, horns, funky rhythm. Listen to it loud and try to keep your foot from tapping.
  • Billie Jean. You know I had to include this. Get your moonwalk on.
  • Man in the Mirror. If we remember nothing else about MJ, maybe we can remember this call for compassion and positive change. No message could have been any clearer.

    • If you wanna make the world a better place/take a look at yourself and make a change.

Rest in Eternal Peace, Gloved One. And thanks for the music.