Everyone’s blogging, I should too!
I first wanted to write a blog because it was the the cool thing to do. Everyone and their dog had a blog, and I had to get one to keep up with the Joneses. Setting up a new blog is after all very straightforward – all you have to do is get an account with one of the premier blogging platforms like wordpress, blogger or typepad, and you’re off writing your first post within minutes. Blogging guru Darren Rowse explains everything that you’d want to think of while choosing a blog platform. So, off I went, signed up for a hosting service and set up my own blog. Cool, but now what?
So, what should I blog about?
Now that I have a soapbox to stand on, just start speaking, right? Not so fast. What the heck was I going to blog about? Blogging gurus will tell you that focusing on a niche topic is more likely to get an audience and keep them interested.
If you look at some of the most popular blogs out there, you’ll notice a common theme. They have excellent content about a niche topic and publish on a regular schedule. Now, all I needed to do was figure out what my niche topic was. I didn’t have to look too long, because ProBlogger had another great post on how to choose a niche.
Niche? I don’t have one
My interests typically vary on an hourly basis – right this moment, it might be technology, but the next minute or hour it might be spirituality, sports, food or something else. Why couldn’t I just write about anything and everything that interests me? The heck with it all, that’s exactly what I’m going to do – write about topics that interest me… technology, programming, gadgets, tennis, photography, philosophy, parenting, kids, science, spirituality, personal-growth, meditation, health, food, travel etc.,
Finding time to write about the afore mentioned topics is also going to be a challenge. Sure, I have thoughts, ideas and happenings that I want to share, but I certainly don’t look at myself as a serious writer, and the goal of this blog is more along the lines of a hobby, and so, I’ll write when I have something interesting to share.
The Social Media revolution
You can run, but you can’t hide. In what some are calling the biggest shift since the industrial revolution, social media is taking over our lives. Just look at some of these statistics…
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- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
- % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
- The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- There are over 200,000,000 blogs.
My first foray into social networking was the genealogy site Geni, which let me create and manage a family tree. I added my immediate family, and relatives that I know of, invited them to join in as well. Before long, I was interacting with people I had not met or seen in a long time. This was a fantastic way to stay in touch with people, share thoughts and comments, exchange pictures and videos, publish events, and last but not the least remember people’s birthdays!
Before long, I was connected with friends on Facebook, professionally connected via LinkedIn. I was sharing pictures on Flickr, musical tastes on Pandora & Last.Fm, finding and sharing links, sites and bookmarks on StumbleUpon, Google Reader, Digg & Delicious.
Over the last few months however, I have fallen in love with the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. While letting me post random thoughts – limited to 140 characters – about various topics that interest me, it also provides wonderful insight into the thought process behind some of the best minds around. An interesting message – or tweet – can get viral pretty fast causing a “butterfly effect”. If you are so inclined, there are quite a few other twitter like services – FriendFeed, Plurk & Google Buzz – to choose from.
Now that the entire world is moving to social media and embracing Facebook and Twitter, I guess the blog, as an individual tool of expression is dead. Or, so I thought.
While social networks like Facebook, Twitter and the likes offer a great way to express parts of that stream at random, a blog is a much more planned, organized, and a more deliberate way to do the same, in a lot more than 140 characters. Chris Brogan had this to say…
There’s a difference between making a meal and grabbing a snack. Eating only snacks can lead to us getting flabby. It means we spend less time in deliberate contemplation. It means there aren’t as many places to exercise our larger thoughts.
I want the best of both worlds – blogging for longer posts, social media for short concise thoughts. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to make the blog a hub, with content from all my social networks aggregated in? Turns out there is a way!
Life is but a stream
Lifestreaming, a term coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter in the 90s refers to a stream of documents that function as a diary of your electronic life.
WordSpy defines it as
An 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
So, my lifestream would be an aggregation of my social network updates? and why exactly would I want to do that? Mark Krynsky at the lifestream blog has four great reasons why, and reason #4 – create a personal digital archive of my life – was good enough for me to consider lifestreaming.
Lifestreams are becoming interactive digital diaries of our lives. While we still have a ways to go for this to become a reality, I see it coming. I can envision a future where I’m reminiscing about my past, going through my Lifestream and re-living old memories. You could locate notable dates in history to see what you were doing & what was on your mind. After we have passed, our great great grandchildren could get a much better understanding of who we were by navigating our historical Lifestream. I can see amazing future applications where you navigate a digital family tree and can drill down on individuals and then start navigating through their Lifestream.
There are two ways to get a lifestream going – use a hosted solution like friendfeed, tumblr, posterous or soup.io, or host your own, using wordpress plug-ins like lifestream or profilactic. For a comprehensive set of resources for your every lifestreaming need, check out the lifestream blog. Since I already host my own blog, it made sense for me to go with a wordpress plug-in.
Life happens! live it, love it, stream it
Now that I have everything I need, hopefully, I can share with you the happenings (at least the ones I want to) in my life that maybe useful in yours, or at the very least anecdotal. I may not be the expert when it comes to some of the afore mentioned topics, but there is no question that I am the expert when it comes to my own life. After all, no one knows my life better than I do, or provide my perspective on my life like I can. So, check out my blog, er, lifestream…
-ramesh prabhu
