A Gaggle of Web 2.0 Editors

I must admit that I have left glaring grammatical errors and sloppy spelling mistakes in my blog posts on a regular basis. I’ve noticed them but stopped myself from correcting them to avoid spending too much time online.

According to Marshall Kirkpatrick‘s ReadWriteWeb article, bloggers lose credibility, authority and lack legitimacy in their knowledge claims when they cut corners on editing grammar and spelling.

Kirkpatrick recommends gooseGrade which offers an open crowd source tool that allows readers to edit blog posts and suggest changes. Writers and editors can potentially earn credibility points by participating.

I’ve registered and edited gooseGrade’s deliberate errors just to see how it works.

It’s a great idea although it could become addictive to anyone used to correcting copy.

For some reason I used to think that blogs were a place where writers could be more relaxed about typos etc. I guess n0t.

Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader

RSS is a big deal, as anyone who’s subscribed to even a few feeds probably knows. Once you get past just a few feeds, though, it can quickly get overwhelming. RSS can leave you feeling inadequate, brain-dead and uninspired.

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In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

NYT article on the at-risk lifestyles of high-speed, high-stress, high-adrenalin lifestyles of pro-bloggers chasing new improved on-line newstories 24/7.

Thanks to twitter and Steve Rubel’s lifestream for bringing this article to my attention.

“digg.com blurb: “Some professional bloggers complain of physical and emotional strain created by an Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.”

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This reminded me of an article by Kate Argyle (1996) in Rob Shields useful anthology entitled Cultures of the Internet. Argyle’s account of what happens when a member of a virtual community dies challenged notions of that Internet communities were blasé and that the Internet itself fostered  a culture of distance and indifference. See http://www.socresonline.org.uk/1/3/van_loon.html

Webliography and bibliography

Argyle, Kate. 1996. “Death on the Internet.” in Shields, Rob. 1996. Cultures of the Internet: Virtual Spaces, Real Histories, Living Bodies. Chapter 8. London: Sage. ISBN 0 8039 7519 8

Dashboard for Dummies: Self-submitting and auto-generation

This freeze-screen image WordPress, Flickr and Digg is from my Flickr album. Wordpress and digg: Self-submitting and the auto-generation of headlines, descriptions and categories. Bricoleur/bricoleuse refers to a do-it-yourself model of using social media as a way to share resources by producing a bricolage of content, codes and connectivity with tools, methods and technologies usually created for another purpose.

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35 Ways to Stream Your Life

Wordspy describes lifestreaming as a way of aggregating a user’s online content. In two separate ReadWriteWeb articles MacManus (2008-01-14) and Catone (2008-02-29) describe what lifestreaming is and how to stream your on-line life using web apps. “Lifestreaming [applications] generally fall into two categories: those that help you keep track of and display your own lifestream and those that help you keep track of your friend’s lifestreams (or both). For the sake of clarity, we’ve focused mainly on the former for this list (Catone 2008-02-29).”

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Timeline of usage of the noun lifestream and related concepts

2003-07-23 “Much about parenting can be dispiriting. One is when your kids grow up and the fruit of all your stress and toil, all the theme-party torture you endured, is nary a raisin in the sun. That, my child, is why we take pictures. Incessant pictures. And video. Mind-numbing, life-streaming video. We want you to have hard evidence, suitable for a grand jury, that we cared (Young 2003-07-23).

2006-11-07 Jeremy Keith, a web developer living and working in Brighton, England posted a journal entry entitled “Streaming my life away” on his blog Adactio, his on-line home, describing how he had “mocked up my own little life stream, tracking my Twitter, Flickr, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, and blog posts. It’s a quick’n’dirty script that isn’t doing any caching. The important thing is that it’s keeping the context of the permalinks (song, link, photo, or blog post) and displaying them ordered by date and time. … You can also find me scattered across these sites: … Lifestreaming via Jaiku (Keith 2006)”

2007-02-18 Mark Krynsky summarized what was being done in the name of lifestreaming in his blog “Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing?” He included his code and listed his feeds including http://feeds.feedburner.com/Krynskycom, http://www.youtube.com/rss/user/krynsky/videos.rss, http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/krynsky/recenttracks.rss,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/82524306@N00/, http://www.librarything.com/rss/recent/krynsky, http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/krynsky, http://digg.com/rss/krynsky/index2.xml

2007-03-17 Mark Krynsky uploaded his first post his new blog on lifestreaming. In January 2008 he described how he had created it because he had “already felt that Lifestreaming had the right recipe for becoming something big. [He] was so intrigued by this new concept but as is the case in most early web innovation, the information and resources were spread out all over the place. [He] felt it was a great opportunity to create a hub for all this data and so the Lifestream Blog was born (Krynsky 2008-01).” ReadWriteWeb authors referred to his blog in their articles.

2007-07-22 “Lifestreaming, like the movie Being John Malkovich, will allow you to climb inside the head of someone and experience their day via a digital smorgasboard of public text messages, blog posts, GPS-tagged photos and (thanks to mobile broadband and tiny videocameras) a live video stream of them as they move around their world (Mulley 2007-07-22).”

2007-11-06 Wordspy uploaded their definition for the noun lifestreaming (also lifestreamer n., lifestream v., n.) a “[a]”n online record of a person’s daily activities, either via direct video feed or via aggregating the person’s online content such as blog posts, social network updates, and online photos (McFedries 2007)” based on citations of lifestreaming as used by Young (2003-07-23), Mulley (2007-07-22).” The copyright (1995 – 2008) for Wordspy is held by Paul McFedries and Logophilia Limited.

2008-01-14 Richard MacManus published an article entitled “Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer.” summarizing what was being done in the name of ‘lifestreams’ as defined by Wordspy (2007). ReadWriteWeb.

2008-02-29 ReadWriteWeb published Catone’s article entitled “35 Ways to Stream Your Life” in which Catone listed and reviewed the following lifestreaming [application] that help users keep track of and display their own lifestream:  Tumblr, Onaswarm, Jaiku, Lifestrea.ms, Soup.io,FriendFeed, MyBlogLog, Profilactic, iStalkr, Correlate.us, ProfileFly, Second Brain, Explode.us, liveZuu, OneSwhirl, Socialthing!, iminta, Plaxo Pulse,, Identoo, Escaloop, Hictu, Life2Front, 30Boxes, Readr, Suprglu, Where is me?, Slifeshare, MovableType ActionStreams, SimpleLife, WP Lifestream, RSS Stream, oneConnect, Facebook (?), Socialstream and Jeremy Keith’s Lifestreaming Script.

Webliography

Catone, Josh. 2008. “35 Ways to Stream Your Life.” ReadWriteWeb. February 29. (2008-02-29)

Keith, Jeremy. 2006. “Streaming my life away” Lifestreaming via Jaiku. Adactio. November 7, 2006.

Krynsky, Mark. 2007. “Lifestream – Could it be the next big thing?” >> http://krynsky.com. February 18, 2007. 

McFedries, Paul. 2007. “Lifestreaming.” Wordspy. Uploaded November 6, 2007. (2007-11-06).  

MacManus, Richard. 2008. “Lifestreaming: a ReadWriteWeb Primer.” ReadWriteWeb. Posted January 14, 2008. (2008-01-14)

Lifestreaming Comes to Yahoo! with MyBlogLog Overhaul

Mulley, Damien. 2007. “Being Damien Mulleyvitch,” Sunday Tribune. July 22, 2007.

Young, John. “Mom, Dad: take pictures,” Cox News Service. July 22, 2003.

Notes:

1. Mark Krynsky, an  Independent Internet Professional wrote this entry in “What is a Lifestream? It’s a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline. It is only limited by the content and sources that you use to define it. Mine is available here. Most people that create them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activities such as Del.icio.us (bookmarking), Last.fm (Music we listen to), Flickr (photos we take) etc…Then you can either find software to host your own, or find sites that provide a platform for you. Many people have been writing about Lifestreams and the potential value they offer for ourselves and others. Some of those people are Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith, and Emily Chang. It appears to be a concept that is gaining quite a bit of steam. I was inspired to create a blog for the Lifestream concept after doing a little research which I wrote about on my blog. Most of the information I found was pretty scattered and there wasn’t a central repository of resources so I thought I should create one. I feel that beyond the self expression of allowing people to track their actions in a passive manner there will be many more exciting technologies that will surface from the backend data aggregation that can occur from people supplying this information. I plan on providing information on this site as it relates to Lifestreaming and related technologies in general.”

ReadWriteWeb include these categories in their menus: Products, Trends, Digital Media, Web Office, International, Events, Jobs, Archives.

Popular tags for ReadWriteWeb suggested by them are google, facebook, microsoft, amazon, yahoo, social networking, twitter, search, semantic web, mobile web, myspace, video, music, mobile, privacy, blogging, advertising, opensocial, data portability, youtube, innovation, digg, startups, rss, politics, linkedin, health, flickr, dataportability, conferences, apple, social graph, open source, obama, mp3, itunes, iphone, internet, tv, apps, api, social news, social media, OpenID, openid, kindle, ibm, citizen, journalism, web 2.0, viral, marketing, tagging.

Their Digg code is:

‘http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/35_lifestreamin_apps.php’;
digg_bgcolor = ‘#ffffff’;
digg_skin = ‘compact’;

I would add egostreaming to lifestreaming and other related words suggested by Wordspy which include blog, celeblog, egocasting, lifecasting, microblogging, microchannel, micro-fiction and nanopublishing.

Subject Categories suggested by Wordspy
Computers > Blogging > lifestreaming
Computers > Communications > lifestreaming
Sociology > Lifestyles > lifestreaming

I would add mashup to the list of tags suggested by ReadWriteWeb: products, lifestreaming.

Lifestreaming Comes to Yahoo! with MyBlogLog Overhaul

Revealing tag cloud of Bill Gates’ CES Keynote address, Seattle (2007/12/01)

From one of the tops on my blogroll http://www.readwriteweb.com reports on reporter Todd Bishop at Seattle P-I newspaper, who used a ‘gizmo’ to generate this tag cloud of Bill Gates’ address to the International Electronics Show. Readwriteweb provides the link to the full talk

ReadWriteWeb is delivered to my PC through my gmail every morning. I chuckled when I read the article and Dugg it immediately.

One of the things that I really appreciate about your way of working is the strenuous efforts you make to provide all relevant references. So I read Bill Gates’ key note address and I used ClearForest Gnosis
to tag cloud Gates’ article and I came up with a different cloud.

I am quite sure that I learned about Gnosis from your blog? Anyhow I think the device of tag clouds, that is also a feature of deli.cio.us and my favourite feature in WordPress, is one of the best conceptual tools being explored on Web 2.0. (I inserted my delicious tag roll or tag cloud into my Blogger page, which is very much work-in-progress inuitartwebliography). I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to insert it into the widgets on my two (free) WordPress blogs. However, WordPress use of Featured Tags has been particularly kind to my 2 blogs speechless and papergirls and they actually generate reliable tag clouds with each of these Featured Tags. This will actually help me in writing articles since the tags clouds themselves become the article.

I have been using tag clouds as a thumbnail image of my own work and for complex texts.

For complicated texts like a book on Western political philosophy I prefer to generate my own using a pencil and paper. For this one of the Fraser Institute, a think tank in Canada similar to the Cato Institute in Washington, I used a cut and paste method while reading through their web site and annual reports. This is the tag cloud imageproduced in Adobe Photoshop and hosted on my Flickr account.

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Blog Marketing; Optimization Tips: Business by Design

In plain English Rony John, pro-blogger provides easy to follow step-by-step tips to enhance your blog. Even for a bricoleur like myself who has no formal tech training, with a bit of patience his advice helps bloggers take advantage of the best of new Web 2.0 tools. Take a look at his clean, readable, content-rich, aesthetic and valuable template.

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