Upgrading, organising and other stuff ending in ing

September 13, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I seem to have spent most of the last couple of weeks trying to organise a whole lot of online identities and applications that have multiplied exponentially. This is in part due to the interest in lifestreaming but also because things were getting in such a mess I really did feel like too many people.

The main bulk of this last week has been getting Thunderbird to link to my gmail account and a couple of other email accounts I have. That worked quite well and with the wind in my sail I proceeded to add the calendar function to Thunderbird and link that to gmail.

On a roll I then thought it was high time that my mobile syncing software was up to scratch. So after a trip to the SonyEricsson website, a quite download and upgrade, I had that synced too. Unfortunately I am unable to sync that to Thunderbird at the moment, but at least it is talking to my laptop, which it wasn’t before.

This week’s to be thankful for list is, in no particular order:

  1. ATMs
  2. Parents
  3. Mozilla Thunderbird
  4. AA insurance
  5. TheBigPic
  6. Dilbert
  7. Free thinking
Filed Under: Personal Tagged With: , ,

How to visualize your lifestream part 1

August 30, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Lifestreaming is one of the hot topics on the net at the moment. As social media sites vie for your retention, you’ll find your online activity scattered over the digital ether. Many sites now offer the option to cross post and this can help us pull more of our online activity together, or at least make it available to other networks. In reality I am finding that it adds more confusion to things. Enter lifestreaming.

Lifestreaming broadly looks at ways of pulling or aggregating all his digital content in some way, or at least allowing the user to see all that they doing digitally.

I have been trying to organise everything I have online and so I have jumped on the lifestream bandwagon. I am currently trying to pull everything together and see what and where I am online. With this in mind I have been really impressed by some of the simple visual illustrations available to show lifestreaming in action.

Such as:

From Lifestreaming in Color

So I thought I’d sit and try and visualize my lifestream. The result was, as I had feared, a little confusing. But it wasn’t supposed to be a work of art, more a work in progress. Here it is in all its scanned glory.

As soon as I saw this I thought I could sort a few things out.

  1. Bring several accounts together
  2. Organise the process of what I did online
  3. Make a simpler version of this map!

So, the basics have been put on paper and the next step is to make it a little clearer. However, just being able to see this has helped.

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lifestream thoughts

August 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I’ve recently become interested in the topic of lifestreaming. I say recently, what I mean is that I found a word to describe what I have been trying to do; bring my digital life into some sort of convergence.

There are a few really good blogs and sites around that are discussing lifestreaming. And a recent post got me thinking. Not simply because it was good, but because it used a metaphor, lifestream as a city, that I was thinking of using to present my lifestream. A link to the post is at the bottom.

I like the city metaphor, well I like metaphors period.

One issue I have with my current thinking on lifestreaming is the archive. In Jessica’s metaphor data is a river that flows through the city. As the data is collected it is posted on our ‘lifestreams’.

Current methods of displaying data focus on new and freshly published data. I am searching for a way to display both the current / latest and the archived / past available.

There are two methods that I can think of to address this, but both, for me have issues.

  1. Calendar access is limited to knowing the date of an event.
  2. Tagging helps a lot more and this may be the way forward, but tagging currently takes effort and often the data that is lifestreamed needs to be delivered immediately.

This whole area is exciting and you’ll find plenty of links if you’re interested in finding out more by following the one below.

Lifestream as a City Metaphor | Lifestream Blog

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