poster session: lifestreaming reveals the invisible

September 14 2009, 10:19pm

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Lifestreaming reveals the invisible
Jessica Mullen, University of Texas at Austin

Introduction
A lifestream is a shared archive of your life, online. Your lifestream can be made up of many sources, like your Twitter updates, Flickr photos, blog posts, or location updates. Lifestreaming begins when these sources are treated as a single information feed documenting your life. As your aggregated data reveals unexpected connections and previously hidden patterns, you will gain understanding and context about the world you live in.
 
Materials
To start your lifestream, you need to choose a few places to share information. Try Twitter, Flickr, or Wordpress. Next, you can take the RSS feeds of your updates and put them into one place, like Friendfeed, Google Reader, or a self-hosted platform like Sweetcron. GOOGLE READER, SWEETCRON


Methods
Now that you have a basic online presence collected into one place, we can explore different services to reveal unseen connections and patterns about your life and how it relates to others.

Steps to gathering the following results:
1. Created a self-hosted lifestream with Sweetcron.
2. Shared information across many social services across the web
3. Enacted behavioral changes based on observations of data collected
4. Requested copious input from the lifestreaming community
5. Synthesized observations, community feedback, and site data into categories of information revealed through lifestreaming.

Results

Environmental Impact
Services like Dopplr measure your carbon footprint based on your reported travel.
Unfolding social dynamics
Shared calendars and locations allow you to view underlying social connections taking place in real life.
Lifestyle patterns
Calorie trackers, exercise records, and purchase histories allow you to monitor your health and consumption habits to achieve weightloss or budget adherence.
Unexpected relationships
Sharing problems, failures, project progress, or milestones allows other people to offer advice, input, or resources that might never be shared otherwise.
Reputation
A lifestream allows others to see a more accurate reflection of your real life self. Your passions, idiosyncrocies and expertise shine through in a robust lifestream, and invites others to interact with you and share their own opinions.

Conclusions

Lifestreaming reveals hidden
relationships between information and people, often in real time.

Lifestreaming can make visible the effect of habits on health, financial well-being, and the environment.

Lifestreaming creates a visual reflection of reputation.


References
All process data on the creation of this poster can be found here: http://jessicamullenslifestream.com/wiki/index.php?title=Poster_sessions
This conversation on Flickr was integral to the development of these ideas:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessicamullen/3918157977/

Alexander. (1977) A Pattern Language, Oxford University Press, New York.
Ferriss, T. (2007) The 4-Hour Workweek, Crown, New York.
Gelernter, D. (1991) Mirror Worlds, Oxford University Press, New York.
Kelly, K. (2007) Lifelogging, An Inevitability, The Technium, February 2007, available at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/02/lifelogging_an.php, accessed August 29, 2009.
Krynsky, M. (2009) Lifestreamblog website: http://lifestreamblog.com/, accessed August 18 2009.
Rubel, S. (2009) Why Lifestream? To Model Leonardo Da Vinci, The Steve Rubel Lifestream, June 26 2009, available at http://www.steverubel.com/why-lifestream-to-model-leonardo-da-vinci, accessed August 18 2009.
Shirky, C. (2008) Here Comes Everybody, Penguin Group, New York.
Slade, G. (2006) Made to Break, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Wolf, G. (2009) 'Know Thyself, Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365', in Wired, (17.07), San Francisco, also available at http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-07/lbnp_knowthyself, accessed August 29 2009.
Wolf, G. (2009) Politican as self-tracker - Bob Graham's notebooks, The Quantified Self, May 19 2009, available at http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/2009/05/politician-as-self-tracker.php, accessed August 18 2008.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to the following for images:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/lifestreaming-aggregate-rss-feeds-with-google-reader/5131/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dopplr/3198685033/
http://vikiworks.com/2007/06/15/social-bookmark-iconset/

Enormous thanks to Todd Barnard for inspiring this poster with his commentary and discussion on the hard data of lifestreaming.