The other day I changed my Facebook status from “Invisible and grumpy” to “Single” and made myself available for dating, friendship, networking, gardening, pool parties and skeet shooting. One of the wonderful things about Facebook is that once you make a change to your profile, it’s not just your friends (and by “friends” I mean dear friends, the friends you haven’t seen since you were 6, the friends who you seriously don’t remember, the friends whom you “met” once at a bar and the complete strangers who are simply stalking you) who see these changes, but so do the targeted ads that appear on your pages.

Hence the sudden appearance of lots of boobs. Like this one:

What are these people thinking? I’d like to just leave it alone, but I can’t. Let me repeat the copy on that first one:

“Don’t be fooled by sites full of men and fake profiles. Find 1000’s of real girls on Overnightmatch.net.”

Goes without saying that this is a major copywriting FAIL by the folks over at the oh-so-classy get up Overnightmatch.net. What they should have said was:

“Don’t be fooled by sites full of men and fake profiles. Get fooled instead by this picture of my cousin Dana with two basketballs stuffed down her shirt.”

And the second one is a little misleading as well. This one does enjoy getting naked in front of her laptop, apparently, but she is also 13. That’s a bit of a stretch, even for me.

Thanks so much for trying to hook me up, FB, but these targeted ads are way off the mark, and slightly, um, dishonest.

Take ad #3 for example. It’s an ad for Master’s Degrees specifically for be-goggled fathers of little tiny superheroes. To the best of my knowledge, I, sadly, do not qualify.

Bummer.

Macintyre: Narrative is not dead, merely obscured by a blizzard of byte-sized information; http://j.mp/2WTd49

As I’ve become more involved in researching and participating in social media, it has become apparent that nobody has “cracked the code” on a productivity tool that would manage all of the different social media outlets (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs). In other words, I want one place to go so I can connect to all of these outlets at once, without having to log into each separately. I’m test-driving Seesmic desktop right now. It’s got a pretty decent interface, but seems prejudiced to only Facebook and Twitter (two SM biggies, I admit). Also, it doesn’t allow me to see private replies on Facebook, nor manage who I’m following on Twitter. I like that it runs on Adobe’s AIR platform and is therefore not web-based, but it still offers a limited menu in terms of which sites I can manage.

As to “social web browsers,” there’s FriendFeed, Flock and Streamy. I’m going to give them a whirl.

What’s interesting though is that despite my downloading a 85 megabyte update to Microsoft Outlook this past weekend (rendering no apparent change in the UI), there’s still not a peep from the king of “productivity software.” I did find TwInbox add-in for managing Twitter as an Outlook folder, but it has some quirks with the toolbar placement in Outlook.

The old paradigm of private communication through email, while not going away, is being augmented (and for some supplanted) by “lifestreaming” … an ongoing feed of communications through various networks that allows publication of “what’s going on” to the world, not just a single person on the other end of an email address. The good thing about email is there’s one point of contact, my email address, versus the many that have emerged with social media.

Whoever can get their hands around managing multiple social media outlets is going to be the winner.

Ah, yes. Another move. I didn’t expect to be heading out again, but one very good thing led to another very good thing and now I am bouncing back to the Midwest. This deaf dumb blind kid sure is a mean pinball.

Thanks to all of my friends and family members who made my re-entry back into the States a piece of cake. I’m fortunate to have such amazing people in my life and I’ve learned tremendous things from all of you. And a special shout out to everyone at Dogster.com – being able to land back in SF and work with great friends at such a kick ass company was a true blessing. I blame Dogster for my addiction to online media and social networking, and will send all future rehabilitation center invoices directly to the lovely folks there.

What’s next, then? Well, I’m off to head up the social media efforts for a few companies in the Chicago area (the “region” as I am told it is called) and see if I can have some fun bringing some attention to the agri-tourism, dairy, recovery drink and chopped salad industries. Confused? Have a look at Fair Oaks Farms, Athletes Milk and Ponte Fresco, and things will start to make a little bit more sense…

So I’m flying out to Chicago this morning, and then I’ll spend the next couple months in Demotte, Indiana, before settling into a Chicago apartment after the first of the year.

For important updates and useless tidbits of information, just subscribe to this blog or follow my Twitter feed. There are a half a dozen other things you could do, as well, but why beat a dying horse and then try to get him to drink and do new tricks. I am also going to work on putting together an aggregator for Tom Price so that he won’t be so confused about my goings on any more, and when that happens I will let you know.

Okay, SF. Thanks a bunch. I think you know how I feel about you. And I’ll just go ahead and put my heart where I put it last time. I know it will still be here when I get back.

I recently created another blog on Posterous but I wasn’t really sure why I would need it. To fill you in on what Posterous is, the tagline from the homepage: “is the dead simple place to post everything. just email us.” And after all, my tagline and the purpose of this blog states:

I’m here to learn, to teach and to connect!

Therefore, I consider adding another blogging platform to my social media arsenal, as a golden opportunity to share the experience with my readers.

Why use Posterous?

I like the clean look and feel of the template I’m using on Posterous. I find it a very easy alternative to the seemingly endless stream of widgets and themes found on WordPress.com. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about the the multitude of features here, it’s just that there are times when I want sharing to be less complicated. Using Posterous I compose entire posts in an email, send it off and I’m done.

What is Lifestreaming?

I did some searches for Posterous and found this article by Mark Krynsky at his lifestreamblog, My Thoughts on Posterous as a Lifestreaming Platform. He uses this graphic to compare Lifestreaming with Posterous.

Lifestreaming or Posterous

Mark does an excellent job of describing both concepts and illustrating how they are different with this graphic. Lifestreaming sounds like such a cool thing to do, how can any social media addict like myself (and you of course) resist. On the other hand, Mark concludes that although Posterous bloggers have recently added some very intriguing content well worth exploring, Posterous remains on the opposite end of the Lifestream funnel.

It simply feeds into your Lifestream just like Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Diigo, YouTube and all of your other social outlets.

Some alternatives that more closely match the definition of Lifestreaming are Tumblr, MyBlogLog and FriendFeed.

Additional insights on Posterous can be found in this post from David Breshears Posterous in the Lifestream.

Why do I need a Lifestream?

I like the logic found on this excerpt taken from Dana Lookadoo

Your online social network sharing is your lifestream, your vapor trail. I’m happy to share my trail, knowing it will be indexed in search engines. Actually, I’m counting on it!

Lifestream – Sharing Your Online Activity.

It reminds me of Biz Markie’s rap song “ The Vapors“. You can catch my vapors on FriendFeed for now.

Leave your comments and let me know if you have created a vapor trail (or lifestream) and where to find it.

Smooches!

UPDATE: A related post with a list of lifestreaming resources can be found on Haleybradshaw’s blog

Dave Winer returns to linkblogging (microblogging before and beyond Twitter) with: Protoblogger; http://j.mp/RJr87

“Let the little dogs lap, Mr. President. It’s good for the nation’s spleen.”

Kathleen Parker, on the noise from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on Obama’s attack Fox News

“For Rush and Glenn and Balloon Dad, the allure of media attention is too powerful to be curbed by a sense of social responsibility.”

John Del Cecato, of AKPD Message and Media.

“So there you have it. Ignite a future for the high-profile navel-gazers of tomorrow with your own bottle of Twitter wine, which goes for $20 a pop.”

AdRants, on Crushpad’s use of Twitter on wine labels

“It’s winemaking, which is usually for us a four or five person endeavor, mixed with Twitter.”

Michael Brill, president and CEO of Crushpad, the winery teaming with Twitter and the pro-literacy group Room to Read.

“Let’s hope the Millennial Generation isn’t becoming the latest Lost Generation.”

Chad Graham, in the Arizona Republic, on how graduates are worried about the present job outlook, their future and even retirement.

“My ‘maternity break’ will end in mid-November.”

Charlotte Shaff, CEO of The Media Push (who blogged about her pregnancy) interviewed by Linda Vandevrede at ValleyPRBlog.com, on ‘Pregancy and PR.’

“First, I felt that after five years my blogging was getting long in the tooth….”

Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, interviewed by Tech Crunch

“For the people, for the planet, for jobs, for you!”

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, on the role of the UN, on the anniversary of the United Nations, which falls today –the day the UN Charter on 24 October 1945 was formed.

Zarrella: Want more clicks? Tweet less. More than 10 links/day send CTR below 5%; http://j.mp/3fe3A9 (via @mathemagenic)

This afternoon I’ve been playing with and testing Flavors.me, which was pointed out to me by designer Simon Ianson.

The service is currently in private beta but once launched aims to help you create “an elegant website using personal content from around the internet”, ie. help you bring a selection of your social media presences under one roof and for it to look nice. The latter I think is the point as much as the former. The company are citing possible uses as:

• personal home pages
• life streaming
• splash and microsites
• celebrity fan pages
• commercial promotion
• brand marketing

From what I understand the service is being built by Jack Zerby, designer director at Vimeo and his partner in crime Jonathan Marcus, but I should emphasise that the project is not affiliated with Vimeo.

Pages on the site aren’t yet public and unfortunately the demo video (also see it here) isn’t shareable, not sure if that’s purposeful, but I can share this video made by someone else who has tested things out:

And here’s a pic of my test, which took me about 30 minutes to put together – but only because I decided to play with the font colours and background design, and was enjoying things a bit too much. In reality you could get something functional up in about 2 minutes and something more to your tastes up in about 5-10 minutes.

During my experimentation I came across a few minor bugs and the team were impressively quick to respond. From Simon’s experience as well, they seem very keen to get the service right, which is fantastic.

What I like is that it’s simple, brings things together, and does what-it-says-on-the-tin as the results generally look good (although some of the pre-selected colour schemes don’t work for all content). I can see how it could be popular as a personal webpage or the starting point for a celebrity fan site, gathering all the pieces of social media presence together.

However, at the moment there are only six social media services that can be added to your Flavor.me site – Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, Tumblr, Facebook and Last.fm. Whilst these do cover a wide variety of possible intents and users, it will be interesting to see how the team balance the design of Flavor.me with the desire of users to have more services included.

Simon also pointed out, and I agree, that being able to add your own domain to the service would add great value to the proposition (although, noted, this does add technical complexity). So instead of the URL http://flavor.me/user/kcorrick it could resolve to kathryncorrick.co.uk (or whatever).

I’m not also not sure that as the service currently stands would be something that could withstand the rigours of brand management and marketing: the fonts – whilst funky – are still fairly limited, and only one image can be uploaded, which for a brand would introduce interesting questions regarding logos (it still always comes down to logos, unfortunately).

But I’m sure there is much to come, given that the service I tried is in beta and de-bug mode put together with the obvious keenness by the team to get things right.

UPDATE 19/10/2009: Jack from Flavors.me has been in touch and responded to some of my queries above. Watch this space.

While in the air, MySkyStatus (by Lufthansa) sends flight updates automatically to Facebook, Twitter; http://j.mp/3fTvZw

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/10/the-history-and-evolution-of-social-media/

Winter 2009 Critical Inquiry essay by Lev Manovich on social media:

The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural Production? [note: requires on campus log in or off campus access]

There’s talk about how blogs are soon to be deceased in lieu of lifestreaming.

The Doomsdayers believe the blog scene might as well be hooked up to a respirator: With notable exceptions given to big-shot bloggers and major blog sites that are already heavily entrenched in their respective market niches.

I don’t buy it. I think the prognosis for the persistence of blogs, in general, is excellent.

It’s not an either/or proposition. Still, this business of lifestreaming is intriguing.

What is lifestreaming?

The precise definition of lifestreaming elicits different responses depending on whom you ask.

I favor easy-to-digest explanations; so let’s go with this one from lifestreamblog:

“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.”

Well, that sure narrows it down.

Just like life, it’s a lot of things

Let’s start with lifestreaming as a “chronological aggregated view,” big giant window, or however else you choose to describe uploading a bunch of information, in one place, where others can see it.

Next, it’s only limited by “the content and sources that you use to define it.”

So… blog posts, updates to your various social media sites — LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc. — links, tidbits, social bookmarks, emails that you float into the stream – basically it’s like creating a single network for all your different online channels.

Lifestreaming can happen in real-time. Hence, you can send a live video feed of what you’re doing at a given time.

Depending on your outlook, lifestreaming can be really cool, or TMI; as in too much information.

The stream scheme

There are numerous avenues for getting your life into the stream of things — some are more robust than others. Popular lifestreaming applications include FriendFeed, Lifestrea.ms, Posterous, Profilactic and Tumblr.

One obvious advantage to lifesteaming is that your friends and followers don’t need to visit many different sites to see your Tweets, Facebook entries, photos, videos, slideshows and all the rest of it. Now there’s a one-stop shop.

Conversely, a lifestreamer need not go to all those same sites to upload, or respond to comments on, his/her posts.

In any event, convergence is increasing. Facebook did buy FriendFeed, after all. You can post to Facebook from Twitter.  You can import your blog and other applications to WordPress.

There’s surely more to come down this particular pike.

To stream, or not?

Inputting and viewing everything all in one place is not for everyone. The stream can look like too much disorganized clutter to certain eyes.

However, if you truly want your life to be an open book, this is an easy way to go for it.

- Deni Kasrel

What do YOU think of lifestreaming? Is it the next greatest thing, or way too much information? Comments welcome.

Photo courtesy SXC.

The other day, when I stopped to think about it, I realized I have a bit of an office supply fetish. It’s not that I’m compulsively well organized; it’s more that, to me, file folders and new pens and notebooks–especially notebooks– symbolize the potential that exists within the articles, columns and other writing projects that I might use those very office supplies to create.
I often claim my root profession to be documentarian, so my profusion of notebooks, journals, blogs and other recording tools seems appropriate. I recently did an inventory of my notebooks/journaling tools, both past and present. Here are the varieties of notebooks, if I may use that term loosely, that I’ve found to be indispensable over the years…

My Notebook Inventory

Reporter’s Notebook—Distinguished by being bound at the top edge and (for the most part) being slim enough to fit in a shirt pocket. I use reporter’s notebooks (or memo pads, if nothing else is available) for all my interviews and never mix interview notes with notes unrelated to a specific story assignment. That makes locating notes from an interview years after the fact much easier, as does my habit of listing the article topics covered and the date range for the interviews on the cover of the notebook.

Writer’s Daybook—This notebook is for all writing-related notes that are NOT interviews, including story outlines, to-do lists, handwritten rough drafts, snippets of dialog overheard on the light rail, and (most importantly) the ideas that often come completely unannounced when I am focusing on something other than writing. I prefer hardbound notebooks with illustrated covers for my daybooks. My mind must be going places when I write, because I’m always drawn to notebooks decorated with map, postcard/letter or travel themes.

Food/Exercise journals—Many years before my current relationship with the food/exercise recording site SparkPeople.com, I kept richly detailed running logs as a teenager. I gave my regular running routes names and wrote evocative descriptions of the weather, my thoughts during the run, and the friends and neighbors I often saw along the way. In late 2006, as I was preparing for a move, I found my old running logs and cracked open a few. It was if I popped open a vintage bottle of wine—decades later, the content was still moving and took me back to a time when I viewed burning calories as an almost spiritual experience.
When I reviewed Julia Cameron’s book The Writing Diet last year, I learned that this type of notebook writing, whether done online or on paper, serves another purpose—keeping a food journal can help one lose or maintain weight.

Blogs—I’ve kept several blogs over the past 4 years—this blog on writing and editing nonfiction; my blog on the creative process, Creative Liberty; a short-lived personal blog and two private blogs that I set up to chart progress on various writing projects I’ve got going.
Using blogs as diaries or notebooks is pretty well documented (since the word blog was originally short for the term “web log”). While my two current blogs are more commercially/communally focused than the preceding ones, I like the digital capture possibilities of blogs for writing research and may start using WordPress as a content management system to corral notes for projects that will end up online in one format or another anyway.

Social media updates—A lot of people pooh-pooh the idea of one’s personal Twitter tweets or Facebook/LinkedIn status updates being anything more than narcissistic over-sharing, but I disagree. While I’m not ready to do full-on lifestreaming myself, I do find that dipping into the journal-like commentary of my friends and contacts has positive research value for me as a writer. When I upload personal observations via social media, I do feel as if I’m sharing some sort of “open notebook” with my social circle—much like a blog, only more limited in its distribution. Some of my non-blogging Facebook friends share their activities and observations through posting notes and links, and a few (I’m thinking of Rod and Bill K. in particular here) friends share their blog posts as notes on Facebook, bringing their content to friends who don’t typically visit blogs.
I’m cautious about my use of social media as an open notebook for now, but I am tantalized by the possibilities.

The questions to you…

• How many notebooks or notebook-like online tools do you use on a regular basis?
• Do you prefer to have your note-taking in some all-in-one sort of solution (one big notebook) or use task-specific tools (lots of little notebooks)?
• Do you purchase/select your notebooks or journaling tools primarily based on functionality, aesthetics, or both?

Elas vieram no pacote da Web 2.0, uma nova geração da internet que surgiu acompanhada de uma filosofia onde todos podem compartilhar suas ideias, estimulando outros usuários a fazer parte de uma rede infinita formada por fotos, vídeos, podcasts, posts e outras formas de estabelecer uma troca de conteúdo aleatório.

As redes sociais (Orkut, Facebook, Twitter) são exemplos claros de mídia social, porém as ferramentas desse conceito vão além de apenas construir um nicho de novas amizades virtuais.

O termo lifestreaming é ligado diretamente às mídias sociais. Sua vida online concentrada em uma única ferramenta: feeds dos posts do seu blog, das mensagens do seu twitter, das músicas ouvidas no seu last.fm, das fotos postadas no seu flickr…

As mídias da web 2.0 vieram muito a calhar para o mundo do jornalismo. Sabemos que uma das funções do jornalista é apurar a notícia dada por uma fonte e que nem sempre elas estão ao alcance. Quer coisa melhor do que uma fonte twittar em primeira mão um tremor de terra?

Já é realidade no Brasil jornalistas especializados em mídia social. Um deles é o jornalista Charles Cadé que descreve perfeitamente em seu blog as mudanças no jornalismo provocadas por essas novas mídias.

O jornalista Tiago Dória também faz parte desse grupo. Ele criou um post falando sobre um jornal na Holanda que acompanhou via twitter um acidente aéreo.

Serão apresentados nos próximos posts ferramentas de mídias sociais que estão ligadas ao conteúdo jornalístico na forma de elaboarção de pautas, pesquisa de informações, programas e recursos que auxiliam na produção de entrevistas e que também compõem matérias que usam alguma mídia da web 2.0.

“Getting Things Done” (taken from a popular productivity guide) has become one of the mantras of contemporary information/network society.  GTD attempts to solve the problem of “real-time” information overload by allowing workers to manage the flow of tasks and requirements they may face over the course of a day.  This year for the back to school season, Lifehacker, one of the most popular websites on the internet, explained GTD for college students.  They define GTD as “workflow for life”: all of life evaluated as though it were work.  One of the questions we will be raising is, how have the lives of college students been forced to adapt to the conditions of the knowledge economy (preparing them for the contemporary workplace)?

The Inbox

It all starts with the inbox. It’s probably the most important part of GTD—capturing all of your assignments. Way too many students think of an agenda or a planner as synonymous with a to-do list. It doesn’t make any sense to write a new assignment down on a planner under a date—that’s deadline-oriented thinking that just begs for procrastination.

Instead, as soon as you get a new assignment, write it down on a list that you’ll review later. A simple notepad is all you need. Put all of your new assignments on that same notepad; don’t divide it up by class.

Don’t depend on your brain to remember assignments, either. Write everything down. That kid who writes things on the back of his hand—he’s not so far off.

The Workflow

Hopefully, you’re going to visit this list of assignments once a day. Since students usually have tight deadlines, nightly will be best. Every time you review your assignments list, you’re going to go through a workflow, illustrated below.

First, turn everything into an action – the first possible action you could take for that assignment. So, the action won’t be “study history,” it’ll be “review history notes” – since that’s the actual thing you’ll be doing. If it’s a project with multiple actions, for now, just think of the first thing you need to do to get it rolling and make a note somewhere that you’ve got a new project on your plate (see “projects” below).

It is not difficult to see how lifestreaming can facilitate a worker’s ability to GTD by allowing them to track and thereby regulate all their online activity. But how does this change what we think of as the distinction between “life” and “work”?

[http://lifehacker.com/5334886/getting-things-done-explained-for-students]

After all, life is more like a flowing stream than a series of blogs splashed in your face, right?

Ok, I’ll stop myself now before going crazy on the “stream” puns here. If you haven’t already heard, lifestreaming is the new blogging.

What is lifestreaming, you ask? It’s a way to pull all that content you’re posting in a million different places (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, oh my!) into one beautiful stream. See a great description from ReadWriteWeb the Wikipedia definition here, and its semi-official blog here.

Please note a special exception: Lifestreaming is NOT lifecasting (see video illustration)…those are two very different beasts. Lifecasting has largely gone out of mode, which I think we can all agree is a great development. People have realized that it is extremely difficult to maintain newsworthy activity every moment of your life.**

**Caveat: iJustine is an exception…people will watch her do just about ANYTHING!

Lifestreaming is about putting the conversation front and center–which after all, is the whole point of social media. Its advocates say it is the wave of the future (I lied, the puns just keep floating to the surface!). Compared to blogging (gulp, yes, I see the hypocrisy) it does feel more natural. You are already sharing links with friends via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and other media, so why not congregate all that content in one happy place?

It's all about the conversation

Another use for lifestreaming is its very streamlined nature. Using tools like Posterous you can pull content from all the sites you regularly visit and then export it back out again. Or if you prefer, you can send your content straight to your lifestream and syphon it off to your favorite spots. See a brilliant graph of this here.

That said, I don’t think we should all abandon the blogging ship (that’s pun # seven, if you’re counting) and take on lifestreaming. I see value in both.

Blogging is better:

• For those who work to focus on a specific topic (like me, I keep my lunch box musings in an entirely separate space)
• For sites that hope to establish the impression of editorial credibility (e.g. my all-time favorite women’s blog)
• For people who want to compartmentalize their lives. You may want to share more personal content with friends on Facebook, but be willing to blast your Twitter followers every few minutes with the latest item to catch your eye. Your blog may be reserved for musings that are truly unique and worthy of extra time. Honestly, that is the way I work, and I’m not sure I’d want to change it.

Am I missing any major points here? Educate me in the comments section below!

Don’t lose track of who you know and what they’ve said, try SILENTALE (currently in beta).

As explained on their web site, ‘the philosophy behind Silentale is simple: with the rise of social networks and mobile internet, the number of communication channels is exploding. Today, almost anybody can be reached through two or three email addresses, social platforms, instant messaging, micro-blogging, text and SMS. It becomes exhausting to try and follow all these fragmented conversations.

Silentale is a new way to keep track of who you know and the conversations you have, no matter how or where you communicate. Whether you start a conversation on email, continue on Twitter and finish with a SMS, Silentale automatically captures, stores and indexes all your messages, including the contact details and attachments. We provide a simple interface and tools for you to find, retrieve and manage this information, in your browser, on your desktop or your mobile.’

In a recent  article, TechCrunch Europe highlights the present and future issue of dealing with the amount of data we are day after day producing. According to one estimate the total data storage capacity produced by humans each year is expected to surpass 1 Yottabyte by 2013. Demand for storage is doubling every 18 to 24 months. And the mountains of content being produced by ordinary people as lifestreaming* becomes more and more popular is only adding to that growth.

Silentale is aiming to store all your digital conversations in one place and allow you to access them from anywhere. Founded by Paris-based French Canadian entrepreneur Laurent Féral-Pierssens and his team, Silentale is going to set out with a very clear business model: they’ll aggregate everything you do out there: Twitter, Email and even SMS. they’ll store it and let you search it. Simple.

Check out as well the article in TechDigest.

Another start-up offering very similar services is LifestreamBackup. The more services you use, the more information you leave about yourself around the web. The more your pictures, data, and information are scattered about the web, the more likely it is that you will lose some part of it. Lifestreambackup.com is your insurance policy against losing that data.

* Lifestreaming is the cumulative stream of information about yourself that you leave on sites all over the web. Blogs, social networks, twitter, facebook, youtube, these are all services that comprise lifestreaming.