serial consign

A few weeks ago, Michael Surtees posted an engaging commentary on his iPhone and how it related to quarterbacking his blogging and wider online presence. This thoughtful text included a diagram from his sketchbook (pictured above) which really got me thinking about digital identity management and the ever-changing landscape of online presence. Between the explosion of micro-content platforms (i.e. twitter, jaiku, tumblr), and the methodology of these services being deployed on more widely used social networking sites ("status" in Facebook), people are warming up to the idea of broadcasting their activities on a minute to minute basis.

[jeremy keith's lifestream]

My first introduction to the idea of lifestreaming was through Jeremy Keith's Streaming My Life Away a post made in 2006, which speculated on possibilities for data aggregation that are becoming increasingly commonplace:

Every time I ping Twitter, the message is time stamped. Every time I post a link to Del.icio.us, that’s time stamped. Every time I upload a picture to Flickr, a time stamp of when the picture was taken is also sent. Whenever I listen to a song on iTunes, the track information is sent to Last.fm with a time stamp. And of course whenever I blog, be it here, at the DOM Scripting blog or Principia Gastronomica, each entry has a permalink and a time stamp. Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

Keith supplemented these thoughts with his own personal data stream which quite clearly illustrates the possibilities of ownership (and authorship) of online activities and interpersonal communication.

Some other key reference that I've come across are the chapter on lifelogging in the Metaverse Roadmap (a document that emerged out of a conference hosted by the Acceleration Studies Foundation last year) and Mark Krynsky's Lifestream Blog, which methodically tracks new commentary and technical developments in this field.

[the evolution of steve mann's wearcam]

The idea of lifestreaming isn't new, but the degree to which this phenomenon is implemented is one of the key topics of discussion within tech-culture circles at the moment. Leading tech-evangelist Robert Scoble recently predicted that micro-content was the next email, and there are a handful of new mobile device oriented, locative applications that further collapse the distinction between social media, blogging and mapping (i.e. loopt and dodgeball).

There have been a lot of developments over the last month in terms of twitter analytics, and while at first glance projects like Tweeterboard might appear as nothing more than an online popularity contest, what these applications are really tracking is real-time social presence (and "aura" for that matter). In a recent Read/Write Web post by Marshall Kirkpatrick, I commented that this kind of application is not all that different from other web analytic indexes that have emerged in recent years (i.e. Technorati's authority as a counterpoint to Google Pagerank). As much as social media has established a foothold over the last 18 months, I think it will be the combination of mobile devices & micro-publishing will really drive web-culture this year.

If you are interested in checking out some twitter visualizations and statistics be sure to take a look at Elie Zananiri and Damon Cortesi's recent experiments as well as Stamen's twitter-blocks and David Troy's twittervision (pictured above).

The world most certainly does not need another blog, but I've launched one anyways. High Flight is a new joint project authored by my girlfriend Jordan and I. As if my twitter and jaiku accounts weren't enough bite-sized web presence, this project is now also underway. I envision High Flight as an outlet for us to archive interesting images, links and video that we come across in our travels online. We're hosting the site through tumblr which is a fantastic platform for no nonsense micro-publishing. We've been having a lot of fun with the site over the last month so please swing by to check it out. We also have another project in the works (one that doesn't involve content regurgitation), and I'll be posting about that in a few weeks.