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via CrunchBase
Anthropologists and historians in the future looking back on the 21st century will have an easy job. A cross section of life is laid out in blogs, Flickr Twitter, Facebook and forums.
We’re micro-blogging more than ever but are blogging less. Robert Scoble and Steve Rubel are among the A list bloggers that have switched from blogging to so-called lifestreaming.
Ged Carroll notes that Robert Scoble has seen a dramatic drop in readership since his move towards lifestreaming.
Little wonder. Lifestreaming is dull. Most people simply don’t have interesting enough lives. At best it’s a sequential record of random events recorded in a sentence or an image. To claim its anything else misses the point.
My use of Flickr is the closest I get to lifestreaming. To anyone outside my immediate network of family and friends my stream of images is boring as hell. But I make no apologies. It’s a personal record and it’s not intended to engage.
Ged reckons that blogging has passed through the hype cycle and is maturing. He’s spot on.
“Over the past ten years or so, we have seen blogging climb to what can be reasonably considered to be a peak of unrealistic expectations and it could be considered to heading towards a trough of disillusionment.”
Likewise Stuart Bruce says blogging – not lifestreaming – is the way forward if you want to develop thought leadership. He makes the point that blogs are far more Google friendly than micro-blogs.
Take note.
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Couldn’t. Agree. More.
Wadds agreed. My impression of lifestreams are that they are little more than status updates on Facebook or what we both thought about Twitter before we realised that we could actually have conversations on there.
Glad to hear that you, Stuart and Ged won’t be following suit.
For me it is a good way to keep track of what I do, read, hear, see, photograph and discuss online. I like having it all stored in one place. But I agree, why anyone would want to follow normal people’s lifestreams is totally beyond me.
“A trough of disillusionment” – I’ve spoken to lots of people who sound like this is where they’re headed, if not there already.
Blogging lets you concentrate your thoughts, where as ‘lifestreaming’ scatters them and can end up being both dull and exhausting
Blogging and lifestreaming is like the difference between information and data. Blogging has context and is useful because it is information, lifestreaming is more like digital beach combing, without context which blogging has each artifact is little more than data.
It is such a shit concept that I can’t even be arsed to read your post. I rest my case.
How do you reasonably evolve blogging from here though? Video is so 2008. Microblogging to point to your blog is so 2008/2009. Or does blogging not need evolution?
When you have similar interests, the minutae of someones every day life can be fascinating. It depends on the person and what they choose to share. There has to be a level of editorial control involved. With flickr, for example, the images are never without context, through tagging, groups, descriptions etc, or if they are, sometimes that can be part of the attraction. Something like Tumblr is the beach-combing analogy at its best, and something of a happy medium between lengthlier ‘context setting’ blog posts and smaller snippets.
Isn’t the distinction about content rather than format? Forgive me if I’m wrong Wadds, but a lot of the posts on your blog are more lifestreaming-orientated, like your geocaching stuff and desktop allotment. So in all fairness, it’s pretty similar to Steve Rubel’s new venture, just without the label…
should be called lifewanking
or wankstreaming
In a way I think it’s a good thing that blogs are tailing off a bit – if lots disappear it’ll filter out some of the noise we have to deal with. Especially welcome would be a great slaughter of the internet marketing/SEO/make-money-blogging brigade, 95% of which simply spends its time repeating what the other 5% is saying and generally staring up its own bum.
Besides, even good lifestreams need some backend – somewhere you can place extended articles, photos, videos and audio in a categorised, searchable way. That’s the natural role of the blog: perhaps we’re moving to a situation in which lifestreams are the butchers’ windows and blogs are the pork and chilli sausages?
Liking this realism, too much blag and b***sht spread around by others
Or wankwanking
Unless you’re a stalker or fanatically obsessed with an ex-partner, I can’t see any appeal in lifestreaming.
Twitter and its peers works because little bits of the mundane are presented together, a tapestry of known and random people’s thoughts and actions. In that format, a tweet about doing the washing can raise a smile esp. if it’s next to Stephen Fry talking about busting for a piss in a cab ride.
Faced with a screen full of one person’s musings – celebrity or otherwise – and it rapidly becomes dull. And as for people that are intentionally lifestreaming? Well I suggest they’re either a) chronic narcissists or b) the sort of people that run healing shops in Cornish seaside resorts
But in most cases, hasn’t blogging always been lifestreaming all the way? It’s just slower, more focused and intentional than lifestreaming, in my opinion
Pulling tweets in as comments is also bollocks. =) Good for comment counts…not much else.
Totally agree. I’ve almost been tempted to unsubscribe from Steve Rubel’s feed…
Oh-oh, here we go again – over the last few months I’ve finally updated my facebook status, learned to use Twitter and now finally put some content on my blog (nobody reads it, you understand, but if that was really the point there’d only be 1% of the blogs in the world I suspect). Giddy with technological excitement, I even tried Second Life, though that was something of a dead-end in that it expects you to start another life when I don’t have anything interesting to say about this one (much less the time to say it).
Now lifestreaming? It’s sounds messy. And painful. And a chore. In fact, to paraphrase Bill above, I’d rather stare up my own bum. I don’t even want to do that, but it sounds like a more enjoyable way to spend my evening, I’ll be honest,
I don’t really understand it, but that’s not going to stop me having an opinion anyhow…
[How ironic - my wife just came in and threw me off the PC so she could go on facebook]
Hmm, looking back in the cold light of the LCD screen, my typing appears “ranty”, but I’m still going to post it, as a record of my unique thoughts at this moment. Something tells me I should delete it, but that would deny the world my insight and philosophy.
Thank goodness I’ve still got lovely, sane, reasonable flickr to fall back on…
[...] original post here: Lifestreaming is bollocks | Wadds' PR Blog Tags: a-dedicated-reader-, also-the-online, and-historians, and-opinions, existing-one, future, [...]
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Interesting post and some good comments.
I’m not sure what your stats are like generally, there are certainly plenty of comments on this post, but on the whole i think its agreed that the blogsphere is quite saturated and even quite big blogs like the microsofts blog pages, and even the likes of scobble etc are struggle to get audiences, let alone to get those audiences to leave comments. Obviously it depends on your subject as to how satuared things are, in know if i blog on running i can could get 30,000 hits a week in comparrison to if i blog on tech i’d be lucky to get 3,000.
The trend towards microblogging, twittering, life streaming call it what you will, is in part because you can get the same inpact with far less effort.
It also takes a lot less effort on behalf of the reader to read to keep up with all this data in the form of a shorter more regularly updated bulletins.
From my point of view, Its all a matter of context, different people blog and life stream for very different reasons, and its not that one is better that the other full stop, more that there are some subjects and some things that are better blogged and others better microblogged.
I tend to spend about 30-45 minutes on a blog post, so i might only do a couple a week if i’m lucky, but i come accross other interesting stuff that i might want to let my friends know about then i would tend to mention them on a microblog post.
The reasons for my blogging and micro blogging have changed quite a lot over time, to start with i just wanted to see how the software worked, then i found it useful to hone my writing style when i started writing for local press, at other times it was used in a ‘vent your spleen’ kind of way, to have a rant and get stuff out of my system, more recently its had more of a social context.
In the long term will any of this be remembered in history? I very much doubt it, there might be a footnote on the trends of the day, but very few individual streams will ever be remembered unless you become something of a cult icon, there are just far too many people blogging in one form or another…it would be like keeping every single letter posted in the 20th century.
@Venn Diagram – FriendFeed is a lifestreaming platform that doesn’t take long to set up.
@Olivier D. alias ze kat – Content on FF is well suited to search engines and sometimes appears higher (or at least just below) on Google rankings than on the original platform it was posted to.
The only problem is, I don’t know anyone who bothers to sit on FriendFeed all day to get their content as it’s “Lifewaterfalling” rather than Lifestreaming
Don’t try to fight it Wadds – lifestreaming and lifecasting are the way the world is going, as surely as Geocities became blogging became Twitter. We won’t rest until every moment of our lives is committed to bits and bytes, streamed live online and then stashed in some massive offshore wave-powered data centre to be mined at will.
This is the kind of Truman Show-level mentalness we can all expect to get up to as bandwidth increases and technology prices fall. Exhausting? Yes. Tedious? Most of it, yes. Inevitable? Yes.
Also, kudos to Emily for dismissing something as ’so 2009′ just over halfway through the year!
Corrected:
Bloody hell, we are creating an awful of work for ourselves. The market in precious time will sort out what we continue to do and don’t do. Our personal accountants of the soul have not been in yet.
So noone interested in this subject really then Wadds
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