Jackson Miller

I have been hearing people talking about Lifestreaming more and more lately. It is one of those words that is just vague enough that I am not sure what it means and just familiar enough that I feel like I know what it means. The problem is that I couldn’t decide between two possible definitions:

1. Streaming one’s life on the internet ala Justin.tv
2. Consolidating one’s online stream of consciousness into one place

For those that are curious, Lifestreaming as I have been hearing it used is not about video. It is basically about pulling all of your feeds into one place. That is something I have been trying to perfect on this blog for a long time (as have many others).

I am not a fan of things like tumblr (though River of Rex is indeed a great name for Rex Hammock’s tumblr page). Honestly, I don’t find them useful. The main problem is that all feeds are not created equal. There are several problems with just merging all of your feeds into one place.

Some feeds have many items for very little content (i.e. Twitter). Reading a feed of twitter banter mixed with blog posts is miserable. The same is true for link blogs. I really enjoy Brittney’s blog, but when she moved to her new domain she started maintaining a link-blog as part of her blog. This looks great in a browser, but it is miserable in a feed. I never want to open up a feed item that has no content; that defeats the purpose of feeds.

Feedburner has a way to merge items from one feed into a daily post in another feed. That is a step in the right direction. However, the problem with this approach is that the summary item in the feed does not have a true permalink. That is almost as bad as a feed item with no content.

I have added the capability to merge feeds in statzen. It has some valuable uses. Currently I am merging items from jaxn.org and blog.statzen.com. I think that works because they are both blog posts written by me, and they both have content and permalinks. It is a step towards lifecasting.

As I was thinking about how to merge feeds in a digest I realized that in order to do so I really needed a permalink. Some place for people to link to the collection or to comment. I could easily have a permalink at statzen, but I don’t really want that. I decided that the way I wanted to approach the problem was through automated posting to my blog. This way the collection has a permalink. I can go back and edit it. People can link to it and comment to it.

In order to achieve that goal I developed Summarizr one night. What summarizr does it takes a feed (or group of feeds) and posts a day’s worth of content from that to your blog via XML-RPC. It is like the del.icio.us daily posting except for any feed. Because of all the work I have done with feeds for statzen, summarizr was a piece of cake.

Now I am thinking that I might want to merge the two. With the growing interest in Lifecasting I think people will appreciate the way that I am approaching it. We pretty much all have blogs; they have been our home on the web for years now. Instead of creating a new home to consolidate our lives (tumblr, facebook, etc), we need to find a way to bring more of our digital lives to our blogs. This is why widgets are so popular.

Tonight I will go ahead and fix a couple of bugs in summarizr and flip the switch. While I don’t think summarizr needs to be a part of statzen, I do think that they will work really well together.

I am all about Lifecasting. I am just going to do it on my terms.