Do you feel like your participation on blogs and social media can be wasted effort?
I love blogging and social media, but much of it feels like I’m dropping content into a well to never be seen again (like delicious), or a fast moving river that sweeps it away (like Twitter and FriendFeed).
We’ve got all these great tools and social networks to post into, but are we really contributing to the world in any lasting way? Do the things we post have a life beyond the page it appears on for merely a few minutes?
I’ve posted a few thousand times on twitter. But where are these tweets now? For all practical purposes, they’re gone.
This bothers me. A lot. And it’s the major reason why I don’t do more on platforms like delicious, reddit, friendfeed, identi.ca, gather, etc., etc. The list goes on and on.
Even so, I do participate in a relatively short list of blogs and social networks such as Twitter,
jangro.com, affbook.com, Flickr, snaps.jangro.com, Facebook, delicious, and Google Reader.
And there are even more that I would participate in if it didn’t feel so scattered and that I’m wasting my time.
If I could pull it all together into a single location, I’d feel like I’m not only contributing to the social media world, but they’re also collecting somewhere. If for no other reason, I’ve got them for posterity’s sake.
I’ve recently come across a few services that have tried to solve this problem in one way or another, have given up, and published their platforms to the Open Source community. These are SweetCron and storytlr. They both provide very similar functions which is to pull all of your online activity, your “Life Stream” into a single location.
storytlr
storytlr is (soon to be “was”) a hosted service that allows you to specify any of many social media outlets from which to pull your life stream. It stores each post as a blog entry of sorts and presents them cleanly on your “full lifestream” page.
Here’s an example that popular, London-based, self-proclaimed Social Media Junkie, Zee M Kane launched on storytlr last year when writing about it on ReadWriteWeb…
Sadly, this will disappear with 2009 when storytlr shuts down its service on Dec 31. I don’t think Zee will mind so much as it seems that he has replicated similar functionality on his zee.me website.
The storytlr service is going away, but thankfully the developers have released their code to the wild:
As promised a while ago, we are open sourcing our platform. A first version is now available at http://storytlr.googlecode.com with a detailed set of instructions on how to install.
With this code, you can host your own storytlr on your own server (or on a shared hosting environment). By default, it is setup as a single user mode, but you can easily change it to a multi user host and therefore reproduce the exact service we are hosting on the current storytlr.com.
I started by trying out the self-hosted version of storytlr, which ended in a failure simply because the installation didn’t work for me. After going through the simple installation process I ended up with a blank screen. With no indication as to what was wrong, and several posts and comments within a quick google search complaining of the same with no good solutions, I moved on to the next.
SweetCron
Similar deal with SweetCron. Long story short, developer Yong Fook lost that lovin’ feeling for the awesome lifestreaming platform that he developed and released it to the open source community. From his shiny new posterous blog:
Lifestreaming seemed very impersonal
If I’m honest, I started lifestreaming for me, not my audience. There’s definitely a strong value proposition for blog owners who are thinking to switch to a stream – it’s maintenance free. No more writing blog posts! That value doesn’t translate into audience value so well, though. I think my audience quickly got bored of seeing blurry food snapshots or out-of-context quips from my Twitter feed. Your mileage may vary.
Ironically, whereas a lifestream was supposed to be an intimate, personal insight into an individual’s life… the lack of real audience interaction meant it ended up as quite an impersonal experience.
That is, of course, his perspective. But I feel like he’s sort of missing the whole point of what he created. I agree that it can be pretty impersonal. If you want interaction and comments, you need a real blog. I’ve got a few of those.
For me, this is entirely different than blogs, twitter, flickr, and the rest. It’s a meta blog. It brings everything I do, all over the place, together in one place. So now I feel that now matter where I post, I’m contributing to my own big picture, on my own terms. And it is done in a way that’s pretty fun to look at.
Most importantly, this will allow me to contribute more, in more places, without feeling like I’m throwing away everything I write. It’s liberating and energizing.
I just can’t expect that there will be a heck of a lot of interaction there. That’s ok. I get that on my blogs.
SweetCron Setup
The SweetCron implementation on my own scottjangro.com domain went very well.
You start out with something really bare-bones. Much like Zee’s storyTlr blog above. Here’s mine:
I can customize that template to make it look however I want. SweetCron has a nice API that can be used to spin a template just about any way you want.
It also comes with a “boxy” theme that you can customize however you like. In fact, you must customize it or it looks awful. Here’s what I’ve done so far:
I absolutely love how everything I do, no matter where, also appears on scottjangro.com.
If it has an RSS feed, I can pull it into my SweetCron blog and customize its appearance with some pretty simple CSS.
Take a look and you’ll see the latest with this blog post appearing somewhere near the top (if you’re reading this in a timely fashion, of course).
If you can’t tell, I’m having a blast with it.
Why Self-host?
If the storytlr story doesn’t answer that question for you, I don’t know what will. Everyone who has created a storytlr blog will have to find somewhere else to dump that content. Or they’ll lose it.
Need another example? One word: Ma.gnolia. Need more?
SweetCron and the self-hosted storytlr allow you to participate on these networks, but also grab the content for yourself. It’s your content. Grab it.
This is all pretty geeky stuff, but if you’re looking to get control of your own content, I think this is a perfect solution.
