I came across this tutorial a while back and wanted to share it with you as it provides both a good tutorial for using SimplePie along with the application of building a Lifestream with it. If you’ve ever considered getting your feet wet with some simple PHP coding and think building a Lifestream from scratch to learn that, well you’ve found the right place for that.

Here’s the intro to the tutorial

In this tutorial we’ll build a page that gathers up the RSS feeds of all those little bits of your life and presents them all together in one spot. To do that, we’ll use SimplePie, a feed parsing class written in PHP. It’s powerful, it’s open source, and it’s easy to use. We’ll then hack on the output a little, and make it all look gorgeous with HTML and CSS. The techniques we’ll cover are also useful if you find that you need to aggregate RSS from many sources, like a news page.

via Build a Lifestream with SimplePie | Sitepoint.com.

He states

We will be seeing the first swells of this coming tsunami in the years to come, but for our children the ambient sense will play a bigger and bigger role as it slowly evolves and weaves itself into their consciousness much like Google search weaved itself into their memory functions.

He then goes on to describe the building blocks that make up what he calls an ambient stream and then provides a diagram to illustrate how they may enter our lives.

Before these building blocks can create an ambient stream which is not overwhelming, all of this data needs to pass through a filter. The Holy Grail is a filter which only serves up information which is relevant based on who you are, your social graph, what you or your friends are doing now, what you or friends have done before, and in context of other information you are consuming. It needs to be delivered wherever you are and on whatever device or display can deliver the ambient stream: mobile phone, laptop computer, TV, heads-up display in vehicle or inside your glasses.

Definitely some interesting thoughts which make a lot of sense as we move forward in the years to come and find ways to manage the data.

via TechCrunch | Beyond Realtime Search: The Dawning Of Ambient Streams.

From the post

The code, which is available under the Apache license, is written in PHP and uses the Zend framework. It’s not a masterpiece of modern software, but it’s reasonably well-written and relatively easy to customize. Storytlr has some intriguing features, but it never seemed all that compelling to me as a hosted service—just another place on the Internet to accumulate my crap. As an open source project, however, it’s a whole lot more interesting because now users can deploy it on any infrastructure and extend it by adding support for additional services.

via Ars Technica Make your own lifestream with open source Storytlr

A few weeks ago I was talking to Jesse Stay (developer of  SocialToo) about an idea I had to create an identity page for people on Twitter by building a tag cloud to analyze the keywords made up from the lists they’re on. Jesse who seems to know about every Twitter app out there  told me that there already was one and sent me the info. So I visited the site and gave it a try.

Here’s the page it created for me

click image to view the page

You can see in the image all the keywords used to describe me based on the 142 lists I am currently on. The more times the word is used, the bigger it appears on my tag cloud. You can also click on any of the words in the cloud and it displays the lists you are on that use it and the people that put you on them. Lastly as a nice discovery feature it displays the top followed lists on Twitter for that given keyword.

This app was created by Mustexist and you can go create your cloud here. It’s pretty enlightening to see the keywords that other folks use to describe you. I also feel that it paints a much more realistic picture of who people are by crowdsourcing that info as opposed to taking people by their own word. I’d imagine that many “social media experts” may end up with the biggest keyword in their cloud being “douchebag”.

One of the additional aspects of Twitter Lists is that it now provides a new datapoint to help in the ways we can calculate influence and define users. I’m also a big fan of Favstar.fm and what they’re doing. Favorites would be another great datapoint to add to the mix but it doesn’t seem many people use it enough for it to be useful at the current time. I’m hoping that will change.

Initially the only measure of influence on Twitter was based on number of followers. It’s nice to see that as the service is maturing we are seeing features that offer better ways to help expose many other great people on the service. There are some services out there that are tackling this like Klout and Tweetrank. Yesterday Twitter announced the revamp of their controversial suggested user list. While not perfect it is a step in the right direction.

A social profiles widgetized zone with custom widgets to display your Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, Flickr, etc, profiles in the sidebar.
7 Smashing MyStream-specific widgets, including the new Tabber widget, which allows you to move that stunning tabber anywhere in the sidebar.
Flexible 3 column layout with a variety of different widgetized spaces & layouts.
6 delicious colour schemes to choose from!
Last but not least, the brand new WooFramework2 with updated options panel

The theme offers short blog excerpts and links to 4 social media profiles in an about area. It also offers a stander aggregated Lifestream list but also supplements that with a widgetized photos & videos area in the sidebar. The theme costs $70 and you can get more details on it here and see a demo of the theme here.

Note there are many Lifestreaming themes available for Wordpress and I’ve provided a list of all of them here.

If my experience as a SXSW newbie last year is any indication it will be a wee difficult climbing out of bed that early but for myself it will no doubt be worth it. I look forward to seeing many of you Lifestream Blog readers that day at Chris’ panel.

Here’s the details from the site:

From Facebook’s newsfeed to Twitter’s relentless real-time updates, the metaphor of the “stream” has taken social networking beyond blog posts and on to rich social activities. Learn about ActivityStrea.ms – the open format adopted by Facebook, MySpace, and Windows Live – and how it’s fundamentally changing the social web.

You can view the details here and be sure to take the time to create your personal schedule and add this panel to it.

Screenshot of the new font options and Foursquare addition. Click to visit.

They plan to add support to YouTube very very soon and are looking into Facebook support. If you haven’t tried the service you really should. Although it’s in private beta, the founders have provided Lifestream Blog readers with invites. Just use the code ‘lifestreamblog’ when signing up to get in.

Last week Postrank announced that they were releasing a top blogs of 2009 listing based on the data they gathered for the year. In this post they announce the details behind how they created it. Here’s a snippet:

PostRank gathered and analyzed over 2 billion individual engagement activities on 20 social hubs, like Twitter, Digg, and Delicious over the course of 2009. That data represents the hard work of thousands of bloggers, and is the backbone of our Analytics, Data Services, and content filtering services.

We crunched all of the 2 billion metrics from the past year to rank the blogs by their engagement within each topic populated by our users. In total, we selected nearly 500 topics (491 to be precise) containing 15725 total blogs, and built a detailed profile for the performance of each site – their overall rank, their engagement profile over the entire year, and their top posts as determined by their audience.

I was very flattered last week to find out that Lifestream Blog made an appearance on their list. Below is a screenshot of the page generated for their listing.

click image to visit page

Lifestream Blog got ranked #89 for Social Media and #213 for Technology. When you visit my stats page it will provide details of the engagement score showing the overall activity as well as the top 10 posts from the site. Postrank is only as good as the number of sites it tracks. They were very honest about inevitable issues with this first release of their rankings but are already planning for improvements in 2010’s list. If your site currently isn’t listed I recommend heading over there and adding your site to their great service.

I couldn’t have achieved this without my great readers. I created this site in March of 2007 to provide information on this new concept to share resources with others as excited about it as me. I’ve been overwhelmed with the response and how the concept has taken off. I’ve passionately continued covering the space for almost three years now, and the reason is greatly due to the feedback received from readers of this site. I look forward to continuing writing here and expanding on many of the areas of Lifestreaming.

Noserub was one of the first community based, open source Lifestreaming apps released. I first wrote about it back in March of 2008. It seems like I’ve been noticing a quite a few niche based social streaming sites pop up lately and I just came across another one at Feedmaze.com that was built on Noserub. Noserub is just one of community based Lifestreaming options out there that can be used to create a site. Below is some info on its release and a screencast of the service.

Lifestreams are a great way to aggregate content as there are so many services and social networks out there, that is hard to keep track of all of them. Its great having your own lifestream that you can share on your own site, but its even better when you can mix your stream with others that have the same interests as you.

FeedMaze is powered by Noserub, and we were lucky enough to get hold of one of the people who help create it, and have them as part of our community. Lance Wicks has been a great help so far with the site, and combined with the other developers of Noserub, we hope to make FeedMaze.com the best experience for all of you.

via FeedMaze.com Launch – Community Lifestream | DuncsWeb.

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From Ian’s Post

It was a sad day when I read the ReadWriteWeb post about the rumored shutdown of MyBlogLog. Yahoo has since come out with a vague response that pulling the plug is only one of several “options” but I thought it good to post a few things you can do now just in case they do take MBL out behind the shed.

via How to Export Your Data from MyBlogLog | Everwas.