Wikistreams - Lifestreaming My Wiki Input

A few weeks ago I was at Presence 2.0 along with a few other friends of mine; including Ross Mayfield, Phil Wolff, Kaliya Hamlin. I found myself talking about lifestreaming presence information. Yes I should post my notes here however I’m just pleased to be stepping back in and writing a short blog post.

I spoke to Ross after his session about enabling a simple method to capture my wiki updates in a format that I can feed into twitter or other lifestreaming tools. Wikis are great for a small closed group who see your recent updates. Yet if the wiki is public it would be rather nice to see contributions tied back to my lifestream so I can make the choice of whether or not I broadcast them.

Example: I update Wikipedia. Right now none of my friends would even know, or could learn that I really care enough about that topic to make an addition, correction etc. It’s extra steps for me to even find it. It also doesn’t turn up in any search engines. By contrast, many of today’s blogs when commented on put your comment up on RSS. Later searching technorati or using another blog search tool for your name or left URL… you will often find that contribution mentioned. For me that creates more value. It also means I can find my content sometimes just with a smart search engine. This even when contributions are increasingly fragmented all over the net.

I think we’d make Wikis more popular if it was easier to tie back contributions into a person’s lifestream. I also believe we are entering a world where our blog page is less of a blog page and an assembly of artifacts from around the web. I think it will include our friends content too. As we fragment our inputs a blog no longer has all the context. The freshness of what drove a blog to a post a day or more, to provide meaning is no longer a great rule for a blog.

If I actually had been off writing a book using a wiki during my recent silence; the mere act of sharing recent edit changes with a “edit summary” may have helped. It would have explained my silence only if I had fed the feed updates into my blog stream. For now that is on my to-do list. Making my blog feed richer so I feel it more effectively represents me, what I’m doing and the context thereof.