Why freelancers should Lifestream

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photo credit: Samuel Mann

You may have come across the term, but if you haven’t yet, a Lifestream is a repository for all your social networking activity (a more detailed description for these social networks can be found here). Each time you upload a photo at flickr, change your status at Facebook or post a tweet on twitter, that information is then posted on your Lifestream. What’s it good for then, aside from being a way for potential stalkers to check up on what you’ve been up to all day?

As YongFook casually proclaims, “the blog is dead.” With all the digging, twittering, facebook-ing and flickring that we do, we usually don’t have time to really get down and dirty with our blog/s to update it on what’s been happening to us lately (wasn’t that the original idea for a blog, anyway?). The problem here lies in the redundancy: you upload a photo of your last vacation or first Holy Communion or whatever to flickr, tweet it on twitter, get on facebook to notify your facebook friends that you’re back and give them a short rundown of what you did, post a video on YouTube of that last bungie jump (so 90′s), etc. Once you’ve done all of that, you get back to your original typepad/wordpress/whatever blog, and basically write everything again while linking to the media that you’ve uploaded. It gets tiring.

To maintain a lifestream is to basically host a micro-blogging platform that automatically updates itself of your activities (the ones that you allow, of course) via RSS feeds. Instead of a lengthy blog of said vacation, you can casually point visitors to your lifestream and just tell them to click on the social network/media sites that pertain to the vacation. If you keep forgetting your bookmarks and the last Star Wars Clone Wars Animated Film is Crap site you went to, you could check your lifestream and take a look at the pages you dugg and posted on del.icio.us. It’s simple, it’s easy and it’s automatic!

Freelance writers and career bloggers may use lifestreams to increase their transparency, which is quickly becoming the measure for would-be transactions made in good faith (uberrimae fidei) . Existing and potential clients won’t be meeting up with you on a regular basis, so maintaining a lifestream is one way to boost client confidence in you and your work. It’s a lot easier to net a new business or get repeat ones if a client knows who she or he is dealing with.

Here’s a list of lifestream resources and actual lifestreams that you can check out for yourself:

Yong Fook – creator of lifestream platform Sweetcron. Pretty site!

Lifestreamblog – roundup of all lifestream activities on the internet

Emily Chang – lifestream of the seminal web designer

Joey – my own lifestream. Hehe

Adactio – Jeremy Kieth’s own lifestream. The php code can be found here

Julia Roy – her thoughts on Sweetcron and lifestreaming

Friendfeed – created by ex-Google people. Get lifestreaming now! (no php coding necessary)

David Cramer – get the Lifestream wordpress plug-in here!

Do you have any thoughts on lifestreaming? Are you anxious to start your own or can’t wait for it to die down? Post your thoughts!