What is Lifestreaming?

What is Lifestreaming?

• the term was originally coined by then-Yale student Eric Freeman and his advisor, David Gerlernter, (in 1996!) to refer to a new paradigm of file structure based on temporal-ordering, virtual indexing, and full-text searchability rather than the “desktop metaphor” with its file folders or what Gelernter calls “digital Tupperware“
• as Freeman states in his Ph. D. thesis, “a lifestream is a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life”
• this term has recently been latched onto and remotivated by a number of bloggers who see lifestreaming as a means of aggregating and integrating content from various social networking and microblogging tools
• lifestreaming, in the hands of some bloggers, is seen as a way to construct more coherent narratives, or storystreams, than any lone ICT can do
• there are already a swarm of lifesteaming tools available online
• Google Wave, which is just transitioning from closed to open beta, promises to integrate Freeman’s data architecture concept with the latest ICTs
• although the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog just referred to Waves as “online desktops”
• of course, before you’d even heard of lifestreaming, there was already a backlash against it, grounded in the idea that following all these streams “is starting to feel like watching code in The Matrix” if not just plain “inconvenient“