For this post I am going to break my own tenets and make a post about myself.. Me, me and only me. Yes, hell, I’ll even do it in detail for your entertainment (I just pray that anyone should find this interesting).

For the last two weeks, I’ve been skiing – in Austria and Norway respectively. First week was with a group of guys (including my good friend and neighbor Nicolaj) for one week of drunken Snowboarding in Saalbach, Austria. Great trip! Got to experience world famous afterskiing cabin Hinterhag, where people get drunk in Weissbier and Flying Hirsch and then head down the slope for 100-200 metres to get back into town – on skiis that is! We finished the week with an off-piste trip on the backside of some mountain, which ended up taking 4 hours of downhill, uphill and nearly cost us a seat in the bus home (we arrived 5 minutes before the bus drivers patience ran out). When we finally got home (bad seats + 16 hours bus drive = aching spine), i got a quick shower, ordered a pizza, had a long nights sleep and took off to the airport for a plane to Oslo (Norway). After hooking up with Stefan and Kasper (two family members), we left Kastrup airport, landed in Oslo and took a train til Kvitfjell, where we stayed for the following week. It’s been a nice stay – relaxed and cozy. Personally, I had a some great trips on Langrenn (cross-country skiing) throughout the Norwegian fjell.

Right now it’s 10:28 PM and I’m sitting in front of the dying fireplace, tapping my way through this post, while the rest of the +9 person cabin is at sleep. What will the next weeks, months bring? More excitement? Adventure and danger? New faces and fascinating foreign culture? Enlightened self-realization?

I’ll sleep on this for now, mold it through, work it and bring a post in the nearest future with my upcoming plans Good night!

• Social networking services: Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace
• Communication and publishing platforms: Wordpress/Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter
• Social life aggregators: FriendFeed, Profilactic, Lifestrea.ms
• Social bookmarking and news: del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon
• Information search and lookup: (inevitable) Google,  Wikipedia, Dictionary.com
• Personal organization and communication: Gmail, MobileMe and so forth (Hotmail, Exchange, Yahoomail etc.)
• Video and photo sharing: Flickr, YouTube, Imageshack
• Online shopping: eBay, Amazon, Pricerunner
• Services to centralize the above (online desktops if you will): iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes

This is only to mention a few – check out Webware’s top 100 list for an awesome overview of current high-flyers. People I know, will recon that I love visualization. Statistics, workflows, networks, you name it, everything is so much more interesting when it’s visualized in a diagram of some sort. So:

Diagram picturing popular web apps 2008, categorized after purpose

I’ll claim that all of the mentioned web apps serves either one or multiple of the following three purposes: socialize, organize and/or informatize (self-made up word, but it needed to end with -ize ). Some will overlap, others will not quite fit any, but these are the major needs that web apps will to try to cover.

During the recent years, the development seem to have accelerated heavily, especially at the social aspects of digital online life. Actually, by the time I have published this post, plenty of new services have already surfaced, spreading like a steppe fire. Besides the many new services, a whole deal of new platforms, devices and technologies takes the services to a whole new level and makes the possibilities almost endless. Just consider digital life in terms of: mobility, accessability, reliability, compatibility, extensibility and usability - all undergone tremendous advancement. Simply put, the possibilites have never been as intriguing as now.

Now, what I find the most interesting is how we make use of all the possibilities presented to us. This is the first post in a series, where emphasis will be on this particular topic: how to get the most out of the digital revolution currently taking place..

In brief, a lifestream is “a record of a person’s daily activities, aggregated from online sources such as blog posts, social networks and photo publishing“. The word Micro Blogging is about the same. The idea isn’t entirely new actually. Facebook might be the very first example of lifestreaming made available to the masses. The Mini-Feed updates combined with the ability to import content from other services (Flickr and del.icio.us e.g.), provides the ability to make online activity of the user available to friends. But this is just the beginning.

Many websites are already discussing lifestreaming and trying to predict it’s future. Here’s a few:

• Krynsky.com: Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing?
• Read Write Web: The future of Lifestreaming revealed
• Adactio: Watching the stream
• Steve Poland: IDEA #23 – Your Syndicated Chronological Life
• KK: Lifeblogging, An Inevitability
• Lab Confidential (in danish)

Who does it?

Enough of the talking already, let’s see how some of the lifestreamers do it themselves:

• Julie Allison: Julie became famous for her extensive exposure of her personal life. What’s particular interesting about her website, is the beautiful harmony between design and content. Her site scrolls horizontal, probably illustrating a chronological timeline, and contains different kinds of media – video, bookmarks, small notes and even personal e-mail excerpts. As ReadWriteWeb writes, Wired Magazine even brought an article about her discussing the Internet as a self-promotional medium.
• Yongfook: Also great use of design elements, that support and awakens the interest for his posts (stream).
• Cheslow: Another example of a somehow fanatic lifestreamer is Cheslow. This guy really takes it to the max, aggregating data from all kinds of sources. Check out his “where to find me online” list – impressive (or scary?).
• Krynsky: Yet another example of information flow from various sources

More here.

What does it take?

In order to lifestream, you need a set of content sources (obviously). I’m not sure which target audience I’m trying to reach here, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that all of us uses some kind of online services. Among the most popular are Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and del.icio.us. All of these encourage the user, you, to interact, store and add content in some way of another. Actually, Twitter IS a lifestream web application, that’s specifically designed to make small “quick posts”, thus creating a stream of content about your everyday life (you got it: life-stream). A more comprehensive list of services can be seen here, here and here - basically, everything that’s “feed-able” can be included in a lifestream.

Now, one of the biggest concerns for the average joe is the technical challenge of making this work as a published combined stream. Thankfully, christmas has arrived early this year. A great deal of free services have already emerged, making it extremely easy to make combine all your online activities into a single feed. Here’s the biggest ones I have stumbled upon so far:

• FriendFeed: great service that automatically collects all your services’ feeds, aggregates them and even gives you the ability to integrate this feed to your existing blog or social network service (bonus info: founded by ex-Googlers)
• Jaiku: Google’s new acquisition Jaiku seems very popular already.
• Tumblr: simple, yet effective – also very popular.
• Sweetcron: Yongfook’s lifestream app that’s available (or soon will be at least) for your own web server. This means you can run it yourself, customize it like you want and remain full data-control. 
• Wordpress plugins: a few different plugins have been made for Wordpress.

An extended list can be found here and here. 

Thoughts

The whole idea of lifestreaming is very interesting indeed, but none-the-less, a few uncertainties comes to my mind. Besides the many possibilities, I would like to emphasize a few topics:

Where’s the border between privacy and public availability? There are so much information that can be derived from the use of daily web services, that spying, phishing and spiteful Social Engineering is starting to emerge as an even larger threat. Security and control is an issue that needs attention. Another thing that I know could be my own Archilles’ heel is the amount of involvement and time required to maintain a lifestream (and read others!). A decent flow in the stream demands input from the social services. If the lifestreamer isn’t using these services on a daily basis or only uses a few, the idea is easily lost. An interesting discussion about these topics among others can be found at Just Seven Things.

Before I finish this post off, I would like to encourage my good collegue and friend Ulrich to bring up this topic on his blog Problogging.dk, as I think lifestreaming and blogging in general is very closely related. Anyhow, I’ll be keeping an upon eye on how the whole concept progresses and possibly also launch my own  stream here on the website

Neuroscientists will agree, that based on this simple excercise, one can conclude whether you are considerately left- or right-brained.

If the dancer moves clockwise, then you use your right brain side the most.
If she moves anti-clockwise, you, suprisingly, use the left side of your brain most.

Most will see the dancer turn anti-clockwise, which tells us that the biggest part of the population are left brain sided (source) – no wonder that the majority of our education system and society in general is based upon science, where facts, math and logic rules (more detailed research). For my own part, she started out turning clockwise, but was able to change her direction (not entirely on demand i must admit). This makes me a right-brainer, but it kind of contradicts with the assumption that right handed people are left-brainers doesn’t it?!

Here’s a few of the characteristics the brain sides embrace:

Original source: http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,22492511-5005375,00.html