OMG I like have a lifestream?

The main page of this site now displays my Friendfeed — the comments link on that page will re-direct you to Friendfeed. I’ve been using it for a wee while, and I quite like it. It’s an easy way to aggregate everything online.

Blogging in the traditional sense of the word has become somewhat cheapened over the last five years or so, with loads of people (and companies) hopping on the bandwagon and trying to make money off it. Spammers are getting in on the action, with splogs that scrape content off legitimate sites. To me, it continues to be an entirely personal project, a way to expose my silliness to the world instead of keeping it all confined to email. And as time goes by, I find I have fewer words to say, but my interest in news, politics, science, gadgets, crime… hasn’t gone away, and so I have these multiple presences online, documenting everything in different places. And it was kind of messy.

I’d been thinking of ‘lifestreaming’ (in my own private way) for a long time — witness the shitty job I did on the previous design incarnation this year — although I didn’t know that at the time. But then I read this piece about the ‘future’ of blogging, and it all became clear. Add an RSS parser to the mix, and a CSS-styled, non-widgety lifestream now lives on this site.

Note: I would probably have used the FriendFeed comments plugin, too, but I have too many posts with the same title. Since I haven’t had any comments from FriendFeed yet (too few people I know actually use it), this has not been a problem, but I suppose this is something that needs to be worked out. I really need to learn PHP.

Note: FriendFeed is arguably not a lifestream, but that’s all you need to know about my life if you only know me online. I don’t do a whole lot else, anyway.

• 6 Aug 2008