Via Readwriteweb
There has been a lot of talk lately about the changing face of the blogging landscape. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger asked if blogging has lost its relational focus; Scoble explained why tech blogging has failed you; and even though not everyone agreed with his every statement, there was a renewed commitment in the blogosphere to return to blogging about what excites instead of just writing about “Apple’s newest gizmo or the peccadillos of tech personalities.” However, we’re wondering if people even need to blog anymore…at least in the traditional sense.
Once the main way to publish your own personal thoughts and opinions for the rest of the web to read, blogging started a movement that democratized the web. Everyone could be a publisher. But now, blogging as everyone’s preferred method of communication may be over. What’s taking its place? Lifestreaming. And don’t be fooled into thinking that we’re talking just about FriendFeed here – lifestreaming as a format for communication extends beyond just that one social site to encompass an entirely new way to establish your home on today’s social web.
Lifestreaming is a new way of documenting the activities surrounding your life using a chronologically-ordered collection of information. Bloggers like Julia Allison, whose internet activities and real-world attention-grabbing stunts made her “internet famous,” has used the format to rocket herself into stardom. That stardom even made her the subject of a recent Wired magazine article on the subject of self-promotion. Her method of communication? The lifestream, of course. Her blog is no more than a short collection of photos, videos, copy-and-pasted emails, random thoughts, links, and general over-sharing. The site even scrolls horizontally instead of vertically which makes it seem much more like a timeline than just another blog.