technology – Page 12 – Andrew Careaga

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)

In the days since the Iranian election and the protests that followed, much has been written, broadcast, tweeted and blogged about how Iranian citizens have seized the power of social media to report what is happening to the outside world. In the United States, the mainstream media has picked up on this phenomenon, but sadly most of the reporting has been about the cool factor of Twitter, amateur video, etc.

But a few mainstream media outlets are getting the hang of new media. They’re aggregating the citizen-journalist reports, lending context, and sharing with the rest of us. Mark Jones of Reuters highlights a few of them in his blog post about running web commentary on Iran.

The challenge of providing the latest to a world hungry for the news from Iran “is to match what TV stations can do when they switch between news bulletins to rolling 24 hour coverage,” Jones writes. “Only the web ought to be able to do so much more given its scope for interactivity.”

In an ideal world you’d want to provide the fastest, most thoroughly verified reports around the clock whether they or not they are from conventional journalists. And as a user I think you’d also want to be pointed in the direction of where you can find out more. If all this was easy then it would have been done by now. But it’s a lot of work. And all news organisations have had to strike compromises on one or more of those counts.

Live blogs that attempt to document the unrest in Iran — such as The Guardian’s and the New York Times lede blog — help to meet some of that need for information and blend the accounts of citizens on the ground with journalists’ analysis and annotation. Jones also discusses (briefly) reporters logs, which rely on the news organization’s staffers instead of citizen journalists, and “the most interesting approach,” aggregated information streaming in from “validated” citizen journalists, such as what Sky News is doing.

“None of these approaches has entirely nailed it,” Jones writes. In his perfect scenario, the ideal blend of mainstream and social-networking media would include:

Direct publishing by sources validated by the news organization
The ability for live blog anchors to republish and annotate external contributions
A means by which participants could add to or critique particular elements of the commentary

What about you? How do you think mainstream and newstream media should converge to cover this unfolding story?