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.

In the new year its all about doing what we do better, streamlining it and being more effective, here is a list of websites and blog posts that just might help you get that ball rolling.

Lee Odden whom I respect very much has just posted an article about 6 social search engines. The great thing about this, is that I have not heard of any of these before and I love when there are new shiny things out there that might make what we do better. Let me know what you think.

Contrary to how some of you might use Twitter or better yet, the way you add followers, I like to check out who’s following me before I follow them back. With that being said, Taly Weiss started following me the other day, and as I’m wont to do, I checked out her bio and then checked out her  blog site, Trendspotting, This site has so much cool data that it can only help to shape your opinions to make you smarter. I’m glad we found each other.

So staying on the topic of Twitter, if you don’t know what Mr. Tweet is yet, I’d suggest you investigate. Do so at your own risk since it helps you determine who you should follow. You could end up using it all day. But even better, check out Mr. Tweet’s blog too.

And while you’re at it, read this article about the 10 ways that twitter will be changing blog design in 2009. I’m not sure I totally agree with it, but you can definitely see how Twitter is weaving it’sw ay into the fabric of what do online.

I haven’t used this yet but at $139 a year for online  computer and technical support, it isn’t a bad deal. Although iYogi led me to think it was a yoga site.

Here’s a great list of the up and coming companies of  the 2009 Social CRM/CRM 2.0 Space, maybe one of them might help you or your company?

Profilactic is a social media aggregator/lifestreaming service that pulls together just about everything you and your friends create online, it currently supports 190 social sites.

I came across Ennect somehow somewhere, maybe one of its web marketing components  might work for you?

A very good friend of mine Paul Chaney writes a great blog, check out what his 4 goal words are for 2009 and then go check out the company Paul works for Bizzuka

Ok, so now you have 10 sites or blog posts that can jump start 2009. You see if we can’t share the resources that we bookmark, then how else are we going to get better at what we do? I need to rely on you to help me get better. What sites or blogs would you suggest or recommend?

I test if I can create a website and integrate the blog in it.

So I’ve been playing with Profilactic, which is similar to FriendFeed, although I won’t call it a clone. One of it’s selling points is that it supports 190 sites, as I have many of these sites hooked into my Ping.FM (currently down) like FriendFeed it collates all the messages that I distribute into the microblogosphere.

Thanks to DutchMob for the hint.

Technorati Tags: microblogosphere, microblogging, friendfeed, profilactic

Profilactic is a lifestreaming website. What is lifestreaming?  Some of us tend to go on a wild signing-up spree when we see amazing new Web 2.0 tools or social networks. We soon realize that we have a staggering number of accounts across the internet and our data is strewn all over the place. Then we wish there was some way to keep all this content in the same place and access them quickly. This is where lifestreaming comes into the picture.

Lifestreaming also helps us to share our online content, profiles and activities with a wide audience including friends and family. Profilactic helps you create a mashup of all your content from various websites and share it with other friends on the site. You can also create a lifestream badge with links to your various accounts and the your latest activity on each of the accounts. This badge helps you display your lifestream on your blog or website for others to see. Similarly, an RSS feed can be generated for all the content you have posted across multiple sites.

Profilactic currently supports 190 social sites.

You can request Profilactic to add new sites which may not be present in the existing list of supported sites. Profilactic lets you aggregate your content with RSS Feeds from your websites. And of course, it counts your tweets in from twitter. Another important features is the ability to save clippings of content where you or your site have been quoted or mentioned on another site. Check this out and trust me, it is pretty useful!

From the blog:

Could life streaming make corporate newsletters obsolete?
If done right, life streaming as incorporated into a company’s communications strategy could potentially replace the old static spam-like corporate newsletter. Here’s how…

Read the ZDNet Feeds blog for more.

Cameron has a good discussion of lifestream aggregators in a research context.

I have a non-research problem: two apps (FriendFeed and Profilactic), doing essentially the same job, each with features that make both worthwhile. I like Profilactic for these reasons:

• Design and appearance (YMMV)
• Ability to fetch content from my friends if they use the same services that I do, without having to get them to subscribe to Profilactic (killer feature IMHO – FriendFeed has the “imaginary friend” to do a similar job, but way less convenient)
• Huge number of services that can be aggregated
• Ability to aggregate any feed without giving it a misleading label (FriendFeed will aggregate any feed too, but insists on titling items as “blog post”)

On the other hand, FriendFeed has these great features:

• Search
• Comments, leading to meta-conversations; I was initially sceptical of this but I’ve found a lot of value in it

So my latest experiment: use my Profilactic mashup (available as a feed) as my only item in FriendFeed. That way my stuff gets aggregated the way I like it (Profilactic) and each item is available for search and discussion in FriendFeed. The only downside is that every FriendFeed item is labelled as “a blog post on Profilactic mashup”.

This may be madness, I may be spending way too much time on this, but let’s see how it works out.

update 14/4/08: not bad, but FriendFeed works best when aggregating individual feeds (e.g. Flickr photos are displayed); so it’s back to that!

Seems almost compulsory for web2.0 enthusiasts to write a brief greasemonkey article these days!

Here’s my attempt. Nothing whatsoever to do with bioinformatics; instead, this one resizes Flickr images on Profilactic mashup pages, such as this one. My aim is just to convince you that greasemonkey development is quite easy, even for JavaScript novices like myself.

1. What’s Greasemonkey then?

It’s a Firefox extension that allows you to install user scripts – small programs written in JavaScript which modify the appearance and functionality of a web page.

2. Where do I learn about it?

A little dated now, but still by far the best “jump in and start” resource, is Dive Into Greasemonkey. You can also try the GreaseSpot wiki.
Basic JavaScript tuition is available all over the web: try W3Schools. Since Greasemonkey scripts achieve their effects by acting on the HTML DOM (Document Object Model), a basic grasp of that will help you too – also at W3Schools.

3. Is it difficult to develop and test?

Not at all. It can be as simple as right-clicking the Greasemonkey icon in your browser, selecting “new user script” and starting to write code.

4. So tell us about your first script

I’m a big fan of Profilactic, a lifestream app that aggregates feeds from your online activities. However, the images displayed from Flickr are a little large for my taste – I’d prefer to see thumbnails. I wrote a small script that adds a button to the Profilactic mashup page: when clicked, Flickr images are resized to 120 px wide.

5. Show us the code then

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Resize Flickr
// @namespace      http://nsaunders.wordpress.com
// @description    Make Flickr images smaller on Profilactic mashup pages
// @include        http://www.profilactic.com/mashup/*
// @include        http://www.profilactic.com/friends_mashup/*
// ==/UserScript==

// add a button to resize images
function addButton() {
var allDivs, thisDiv, newButton;
allDivs = document.evaluate(
    '//div[@class="sig_tabs"]',
    document,
    null,
    XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
    null);
if (allDivs.snapshotItem(0)) {
    thisDiv = allDivs.snapshotItem(0);
    newButton = document.createElement('input');
    newButton.setAttribute("type", "submit");
    newButton.setAttribute("value", "miniFlickr");
    newButton.addEventListener("click", reSize, false);
    thisDiv.parentNode.insertBefore(newButton, thisDiv.nextSibling);
                             }
}

// resize flickr images to 120px wide
function reSize () {
var allImg, thisImg;
allImg = document.evaluate(
    '//img',
    document,
    null,
    XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE,
    null);
for (var i = 0; i < allImg.snapshotLength; i++) {
    thisImg = allImg.snapshotItem(i);
    var pattern = /static\.flickr\.com/;

    if(pattern.test(thisImg.src)) {
      thisImg.setAttribute("width", "120");
                                  }
                                                }

}

window.addEventListener('load',addButton,true);

Just two functions. The first, addButton(), looks for a DIV element on the page of class “sig_tabs”. This is the menu bar near the top of the Profilactic page. It then inserts an INPUT element of type “submit” (a button) and configures the event for the button – when clicked, run the reSize() function.

The reSize() function looks for all IMG elements with a SRC attribute that matches “static.flickr.com”. If it finds them, the image WIDTH attribute is set to 120 pixels. My resize tip: just set width and the browser will scale height automatically.

Finally, functions are initialised using window.addEventListener(), which waits for the page to load. Note that Profilactic uses Ajax calls to build the page content dynamically, so you can’t do anything until it’s finished.

6. How could this be improved?

In many ways. It places a big ugly button in a non-ideal location. The JavaScript could undoubtedly be cleaner, sleeker and better (I learned most of it along the way just for this script). It would be nice if the button toggled between thumbnail and full-size, or allowed a range of thumbnail sizes.

The great thing about Greasemonkey is that if you can do better – then go right ahead!

7. Can I see it in action?

Sure. Copy the code above to your own Greasemonkey installation and ensure that the included pages are “http://www.profilactic.com/mashup/*” and “http://www.profilactic.com/friends_mashup/*”. Or, watch this screencast (no sound, rubbish quality – don’t go full screen!) showing the script in action at Profilactic.

In yet another moment of BBGM synchronicity, I started to think about lifestreaming and its applications as Deepak wrote about it. My inspiration was the recent article 35 ways to stream your life.

I’ve tried (and you can find me at):

• Mugshot – aggregates a limited number of sources, doesn’t seem to update properly from del.icio.us, has conversation features (quips, comments)
• FriendFeed – nice look and feel, a limited number of sources, has conversation features (comments, ratings)
• Profilactic – by far my favourite in terms of look/feel and sources (you can add anything that has a feed) but no conversations as yet

Lifestreams are fun. I don’t expect anyone to care about what I just played on last.fm (and likewise), but these are all ways of broadcasting yourself and making connections. Read Deepak’s post for some thoughts on how this might apply to science.

Here’s a crazy idea – the workstream:

• Neil parsed SwissProt entry Q38897 using parser script swiss2features.pl
• Bob calculated all intersubunit contacts in PDB entry 2jdq using CCP4 package contact

No?

Wow! Well this has been a strange 48 hours.

Quick catch-up:

Having raced around London on Thursday evening to pick up a Nokia N95 to use in SXSW, I hot-footed it to the Media Guardian Awards with Stef and Pete who were picking up an award for Created in Birmingham.

Those who follow the above pair’s Twitter streams will know the evening was… well… eventful. Pete and Stef will have more to say on this than I as, I’m ashamed to say, I missed witnessing Pete’s “Jarvis Cocker” moment. But, considering how disappointed all the nominees from the blogging category were about their lack of recognition at the awards (and how much free alcohol was flowing), I suspect someone was going to do something.

Then, after an hour’s sleep in a Travel Inn, we trudged bleary eyed (and sore of head) over to Gatwick for the flight to Houston, Texas. Quick change in Houston onto a flight to Austin (including a very nice chat with the immigration officer who was amused when I defined my profession as “being a geek” – he even told me a Star Trek joke).

Nowwe’re in the Fairfield Inn, Austin which has free wifi (why can’t UK hotels do this?!) and waiting for the other three SXSWM-ers to arrive.

Here are the obligatory shots of the view from my room:

and…

Stef, being the dynamic and frankly enviably capable person that he is, has already organised for the SXSWM-ers to meet a fantastic array of people here, including Phil Campbell, the guys from Viddler and Shawn Morton from Profilactic. I am so excited about this!

Right, got less than ten minutes to grab a shower before we’re off to check out the parties. Remember to visit the SXSWM website to tell us what to do. And, if you’re in Austin – get in touch!