I’ve finally been able to slow down my exter­nal (non–ALA) work enough to cir­cle back around to work­ing on my own stuff again. I’ve been want­ing to get back to blog­ging, but I read­ily acknowl­edge that I’m still not likely to blog at my 2002–2003 lev­els ever again.

Watch­ing Steve Rubel change his focus from his blog to his lifestream made me real­ize that the tools are finally avail­able for me to do some­thing sim­i­lar. Other long-time blog­gers such as Robert Scoble and Jason Grif­fey have been re-examining their online pres­ences, and it’s excit­ing to fol­low the exper­i­ments every­one is trying.

While I admire what these folks are doing and appre­ci­ate the fact that they’re openly think­ing out loud, I knew I wanted to try a dif­fer­ent approach. Because as much as I love the cloud, I’m get­ting a lit­tle tired of being bit­ten by the com­pa­nies run­ning it. Don’t get me wrong — I love most of those com­pa­nies, I’m very appre­cia­tive of the fact that they offer these ser­vices for free (usu­ally at a mon­e­tary loss), and I still plan to par­tic­i­pate in them, but I’ve also decided that I want to own my lifestream and have an archive of it.

So as I started look­ing at my options, based on my under­stand­ing of each tool, I ruled out pos­si­bil­i­ties such as dis­play­ing my Friend­Feed stream as my home page or using a third-party site such as Pos­ter­ous. Those solu­tions work well for oth­ers and are super cool at what they do, but they don’t let me backup or own my cloud. I’m also not inter­ested in send­ing the same update to every ser­vice because I use them all differently.

The solu­tion I’ve come up with is to use the Lifestream plu­gin for Word­Press, which kind of lets me run a stripped-down ver­sion of my own per­sonal Friend­Feed (but with­out the com­ments on indi­vid­ual items). It totally rocks, so a big thank you to David Cramer for writ­ing and shar­ing it.

By default, it lets me set up feeds from my major sites, such as Flickr (pic­tures), deli­cious (book­marks), Twit­ter (microblog­ging), Google Reader (shared items I’ve read about that day) , YouTube (videos), and more. It also lets me add the RSS feed for any ser­vice that’s not already listed (this is one rea­son I still think RSS is the great­est thing since sliced bread and is still very impor­tant). Most major ones are already there — I just don’t use most of them. Sur­pris­ingly, Friend­Feed isn’t listed yet, but I was able to eas­ily add a feed for items I’ve liked. Since I don’t post much orig­i­nal con­tent to FF, it shouldn’t get too recur­sive there.

There are two ways you can use this plu­gin. The first is to cre­ate a sep­a­rate page with your full stream, which updates at set inter­vals. The alter­na­tive, which I’m using, is to do a sum­mary post of all of your activ­ity at a spe­cific time each day. This way, I can aggre­gate all of my non-blogging activ­ity in one post at the end of the day.

Even bet­ter, the Lifestream plu­gin seems to actu­ally import each item so I have a copy of it. I’m assum­ing these are in a data­base I have access to, but I still need to fol­low up on that. Ide­ally, this means I have backup copies of all of my text updates on any aggre­gated ser­vice, and I can access it in the future if one of those ser­vices ever dis­ap­pears. In addi­tion, adding the stream to my blog means things like my Google Reader shared items, tweets, and deli­cious book­marks get indexed there, so I can search for most of my stuff in one place. It’s not really orga­nized in any way, other than chrono­log­i­cal, but I’ll be inter­ested to see if hav­ing a search­able ver­sion gives me any advan­tages down the road.

This isn’t ideal, but it’s enough of a first step for me to imple­ment this for a while to see how it works. All lifestream posts from the plu­gin should appear in the Lifestream cat­e­gory, which I think I’ve now excluded from email updates for my site. I’ve also set Twit­ter­feed to only share links to posts from my site that have the tag #blog­post in order to avoid a recur­sive stream there. I’m still look­ing for a way to pre­vent the lifestream posts from appear­ing in Friend­Feed. I have a feel­ing I have to add some magic behind the scenes to get an RSS feed for just the “blog­post” tag or cat­e­gory in order to feed just those items into FF.

Another issue is com­ments, but I haven’t found a good way to aggre­gate all of the com­ments on my items back into my site. I’d love to be wrong that this isn’t yet pos­si­ble, so please let me know if you’ve done this suc­cess­fully. It’s also unfor­tu­nate that I can’t use an RSS feed of just my com­ments from Friend­Feed, because it counts my deli­cious descrip­tions as “comments.”

I also have to make a deci­sion about Face­book and my sta­tus updates there. It’s the only site I post to that’s even remotely pro­tected, and even though I don’t post any­thing there I wouldn’t want the world to read, I still like the idea of hav­ing one site that really is just my friends and friend­sters. I’m torn, though, because it would be nice to archive those sta­tus updates along with the rest of my stream. We’ll see if that desire ulti­mately wins out over hav­ing a smaller online circle.

This solu­tion won’t work for every­body, but I’m going to let this solu­tion run for at least a cou­ple of months to see how it works, and I’d be inter­ested in your feed­back over time, but I really like the idea of aggre­gat­ing my own dig­i­tal iden­tity so that I have more con­trol over it (espe­cially under my domain). I do intend to keep blog­ging, although I sup­pose now tech­ni­cally my blog will be the blog­post tag for this site. The blog items won’t always be this long, but hope­fully this will get me back into a flow where I can at least post starter thoughts or dis­cus­sion points for future exploration.

For so long, my online pres­ence was mostly my blog, but it’s become so much more, and this move helps pull it all together. I can also see myself using this process to facil­i­tate that aggre­ga­tion. For exam­ple, I may start post­ing more descrip­tive tweets in order to explain some­thing that’s appear­ing in my stream that I just don’t have the time to blog about that day or maybe using a Flickr pic­ture to aug­ment a deli­cious book­mark. Regard­less of what hap­pens, it will be an inter­est­ing experiment.

I’ll try to post updates about how this new flow works for me, but let me know what you think, too.

Last week I noted that of all of the social media sites, I’m prob­a­bly most engaged with Face­book right now. Twit­ter tends to frag­ment my atten­tion too much, so I started restrict­ing my time on it to about an hour a day. The con­ver­sa­tion there is too dis­jointed for me, and it’s impos­si­ble to find and refer back to all the pieces of a con­ver­sa­tion even just a few days later. The best I’ve been able to man­age is to use Tweet­Deck to cre­ate groups to check in on peri­od­i­cally, as opposed to try­ing to keep up with every­one all the time. I still don’t let myself sit on Twit­ter for too long because as Ed Viel­metti says, “If you keep refresh­ing it will never, ever stop..” In fact, my rule of thumb on any social site is that I never hit the “older” button.

Then Friend­Feed came along, which helped unify con­ver­sa­tions and brought pic­tures, audio, and video into the mix. The breadth of ser­vices it aggre­gates is pretty impres­sive, so when a crit­i­cal mass of friends hit there, I switched my hour a day to check in there.

Let me pref­ace this next state­ment by say­ing that I love the serendip­ity of Friend­Feed, and it def­i­nitely restores fun to aggre­ga­tion. That said, it moves way too fast for me. As a result, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that Friend­Feed is Twit­ter on speed, while Face­book is Twit­ter on Ritalin, and for where I’m at right now, Face­book is my pri­mary drug of choice. I need some­thing to help me con­trol the fire­hose so that I can more eas­ily focus on spe­cific pieces, and the fact that I can sep­a­rate the links and posts from the sta­tus updates on FB does exactly that. I have the sta­tus of about three dozen folks texted to my phone, which means I see what I con­sider to be the most impor­tant func­tion of the site for me front and center.

I had been friend­ing peo­ple there for a while, watched what libraries were doing, and gone through the “play with var­i­ous appli­ca­tions” stage of Face­book love, but then I found myself using it less and less. I fell back in love with it, though, when they added the abil­ity to com­ment on a friend’s sta­tus, because that’s the piece I was hav­ing trou­ble track­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in amongst all of the con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place on Twit­ter. Even bet­ter was a change in the way SMS responses are han­dled so that replies from my phone now appear as com­ments on sta­tuses, not inbox mes­sages attached to pre­vi­ous emails. That means there’s con­ver­sa­tion around updates, and it’s at a man­age­able pace.

I still check Friend­Feed a cou­ple of times a day, but I’m swamped with enough stuff right now that I use my social net­works first and fore­most for friend updates, and Face­book turns out to be per­fect for that, espe­cially for my non-library friends. I can lit­er­ally see oth­ers get­ting a lot out of Twit­ter and Friend­Feed because they mon­i­tor those sites a lot more closely, and more power to them. There are a lot of con­ver­sa­tions right now about the ROI of blog­ging ver­sus Twit­ter ver­sus Friend­Feed, but it’s impor­tant to exam­ine what you want to get from these tools in order to eval­u­ate which one(s) are best for you at any given time, remem­ber­ing that it’s all cycli­cal and is likely to change just when you get com­fort­able with your rou­tine. Of course, that can be a good thing.