I came across the Lifestreaming phenomenon while I was looking for a way to keep track of the books I read in 2009. Basically it’s the idea of keeping a central, automatically updated list of everything you do socially online. It’s sort of the hyper-extention of what we used to do in ye olde dayes of blogginges, keeping manual lists of things we read and movies we watched.
Obviously when I discovered the idea on Friday I thought it was stupid. What sort of narcissist would collect streams of data about themselves and gather it in one location? Who cares what I’m reading, or what I posted on my blogs, or what I said on other people’s — ooh, it can do that? What about.. ohh. And does it work with an RSS stream? I see. How.. interesting. /twitch.
(Have we spoken about my little voice yet? My little voice tells me to do many things, but mostly it likes obsessing over weird nerd projects. Stay up for 48 hours getting glue in my hair creating tiny sprockets for a paper clock? Okay! Eschew living beings while I obtain some achievement on my pixelated elf? Awesome! See the sunrise because I have to figure out how some new web geek phenomenon works? Yes please. I am probably the happiest when it’s 2am and I’m waist deep in some useless project with no end in sight.)
So here we are, about 10 hours of effort later and of course I have one of the blasted things. It combines the internet traces of books I read, movies I watch, games I play, and music I like, along with my blog posts, bookmarks, comments on other blogs, tweets, and GTalk status. Why? God, I don’t know. I still think it’s narcissistic and has no purpose. I just also think it’s shiny and organized, and I feel so structured that it makes my toes curl. Damn you, trendy new web phenom. (Then of course I had to redesign the site to go with the new feature, and properly tag and catalog all my old posts.)
I also got almost all my archives from 2000-2006 back online, so that’s an actual contribution of content to the series of tubes. I’m hoping it all evens out in the end.
this is so far out of my world, I cannot begin to tell you. what the hell is scrobbled???? did not know you were a Lee Child fan. Martha, Lew and I heard him speak at the Va Festival of the Book a couple of years ago. Great storyteller, charming and oh yeah, drop dead gorgeous. We are obsessive readers of the Reacher books. Care to cast him in a movie??? We have not been able to find the perfect actor.