Well the all knowing wikipedia says it’s; “Lifecasting is a continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media.”

My definition of lifestreaming is pulling all of my digital properties and showing them in one central location. Whether it be social networks like twitter, flickr, and linkedin. Then there is my blog, delicious and more. I’m not sure about you but I have a ton of digital accounts. Sure many of them I use only a handful of times and forget about them. Others I post regularly. The problem is that most of my friends/family don’t know where all of my sites are. How do you resolve that? Pull them all into one site. Sure you can use friendfeed but I still prefer to have my own site.

That brings me to my overall point. Over the past year I have had barely anytime for any personal projects. Sure I’ve redesigned my site a couple of times, that’s my OCD. That is why Tumblr came at a great time. I post most of my content directly from my iPhone. Takes less times and works well for my random little thoughts. Also Twitter has been useful to get those little thoughts out as well. What I haven’t had time to do is publish full blog posts like this one.

We’re seeing a lot more blogs taking this approach because people just don’t have time to write fully thought-out blog posts. I agree with yongfook that lifestreaming is a lot more honest than regular blogging. He also points out that if you post a ton you might have information overload for your visitors. I’ve defintely experienced this with a few blogs. I no longer read them because I don’t want to sift through a lot of bogus content to get to good content. PLEASE keep that in mind when taking this approach.

I’ve even taken the lifestream approach with a couple of clients. My team recently relaunched the GM FYI blog to be shorter posts and more focused on photos/videos.

I think that we are going to see more blogs taking this approach as people have less time to create content for their site but do have time to document their life.

It also helps to just leave my cell and my computer behind. I didn’t even open my laptop once that weekend. I need to do more of that.

Crowdfire is trying something new. If you haven’t hear of it here is a little info:

“This weekend, as thousands of people gather and five dozen bands perform over three straight days at the Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, tech and media entrepreneur John Battelle hopes to create a different kind of performance, a mash-up of the thousands of camera-phone pictures, hand-held digital-video recordings, blog posts and Twitter “tweets” generated at the event.” via Ad Age.

Seems like a cool idea but I think that is might be missing the mark just a bit. Think about it this way, they are using camera phones and hand held digital camera for their visual content. Not sure about you but even my iPhone camera is pretty crappy for taking event shots. Some of those are going onto huge screens while at the event. So that means someone has to sit there and moderate the content and hopefully make it look like it’s not some huge blob on a massive plasma?

They say, “people are doing this” which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. About a year ago I did pitch a similar idea to a client. The idea was to have some citizen journalism and include people that couldn’t make the show. The clients biggest concern was would people look at it? I say yes but it would have be attached to the right platform and need to make sure people are aware of it. Especially if you make it easy to send your information in via Twitter, photo/video. It has to be easy for those people there and the people looking at it online.

Getting back to the original reason for this article, was I still wonder if it adds any value to the event? I think it only does for those people not at the event. If you are there I think you want to watch the bands, not what the fans are doing.

Recently there was a Food Network show called Ask Aida. The show definitely has some promise. I love watching the Food Network. I consider my self a decent cook and novice foodie. So I find myself watching Food Network a lot. The premise of the show is that readers submit photos, video and text questions to Aida. It’s a lot more practical than most of the shows. I find it interesting that shows are having user generated content to drive the show. It makes for a very interesting format. This is key to keeping it relevant to the viewers.

The concept also can avoid the content from missing its mark because they are opening a dialogue with it’s viewers. I think it’s just a great concept.

It makes me wonder if we will see more shows like this one? I’m not sure about you but I have gotten really bored with reality TV. I know this isn’t the first time that this format has been used but it certainly has been made easier with more people having access to upload video/photos to the web. I doubt that our crappy reality TV shows will go away. I just wonder how many shows will intergrate this into their shows?