In April, I started following Taylor McKnight’s “Tumblelog” and since Taylor is my early-warning-radar for cool stuff, I signed up for a free-account (rex.tumblr.com) despite having no idea why. More recently, I noticed that Josh Bancroft was merging all his RSS feeds into a Tumblr.com account at JoshBancroft.com and was calling it a “lifestream.” (Tumblr.com allows users to “domain map.”) Then, Steve Rubel dove in last Friday and set up his lifestream of RSS feeds on a Tumblr.com account that is found at steverubel.com.
As it’s a ten-minute chore, max, I’ve now pointed RSS feeds of all my blogging, tweeting, bookmarking and photosharing to rex.tumblr.com. While Steve and Josh are calling such a confluence of all personal feeds a “lifestream” — I’m calling mine River of Rex, which closely beat-out the other name I was considering, Rex’s ego-hose. In many ways, the right-hand column of rexblog.com is already my “lifestream” as you can find there everything I’m also pointing towards on rex.tumblr.com. The tumblr platform has an additional benefit, as the “lifestream” of all your feeds will then generated an aggregated RSS feed. That’s something you could accomplish lots of other ways, and even I, the non-developer “user,” can easily pipe together several feeds. However, the tumblr.com way is drop-dead simple.
Again, what is it? It’s a website that has a feature that makes it easy to subscribe to and display — in what Dave Winer calls a “River of News” format — last-in, first-diplayed — the RSS feeds of everything I post on this blog, on Twitter, on Flickr and on other services I may use to bookmark or tag web content I want to share. If you use Facebook, it’s similar to the new third-party apps that let you display RSS feeds on your “Mini-Feed.”.
By the way, a “tumblelog” can be used for other purposes than “lifestreaming” and aggregating RSS feeds. Jason Kottke once described them as a “quick and dirty stream of consciousness.” They are somewhere between a blog and a Twitter account.
Technorati Tags: lifestream, tumblelog, tumblr
August 28th, 2007 at 8:33 am
You should add in your GPS and weather, too:
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/weather/default.aspx?station=589&id=sn
August 28th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
I have been searching for a solution like this and Tumblr sounds great. What do you think about these persistent rumors of its imminent demise? They haven’t updated their site in months, and months, and months!
August 28th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
First, I have no knowledge of such rumors. Second, If they are about to go under, it’s a good reason to domain-map to your own domain. Third, if they are about to go under, they may have just found a new lease on life — they should quickly re-position themselves as a lifestream platform if the whole “tumble log” thing is not catching on.
August 28th, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Furthermore, if such rumors are correct and if “lifestreaming” using tumblr does help them revive, then it will be a good example of how turning your marketing over to your users is a good thing.
August 28th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Laura, are you sure the rumors are about tumblr.com? There are other tumblelog platforms out there.
August 28th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
Most of the rumors seem to be perpetuated in the comments of the tumblr blog itself. http://blog.davidville.com/
August 30th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
[…] Rex Hammock […]
August 31st, 2007 at 11:18 am
[…] Lifestream/Facebook App discovery/decision: Recently, I blogged about setting up a “lifestream,” an automated-page that catches all of the RSS feeds of things I blog, bookmark, or share online in other ways. That way, the disparate streams of information I add different places meet up in, what I call, the River of Rex (just before they flow into the Gulf of Rexico). That I now have such an aggregated (ego-grated) feed, I decided to import that feed into Facebook notes and do away with all those Facebook apps that do the same: the applications that merely import del.icio.us, twitter, flickr, etc. In doing do, I decided that nearly all the Apps I’ve added to Facebook are just there, as in, there’s no there there, so I deleted almost all of them. Except Dogface. Now that’s a mission-critical app. […]
September 1st, 2007 at 5:14 am
Yeah - I do this via Yahoo Pipes. mash everything into 1 feed.
September 16th, 2007 at 10:36 am
[…] Since my post about lifestreams last week I have been digging it a bit more and found there’s an active community of people out there who are aggregating their bits into a single site. Rex is the latest to join the club. He also explains where this idea originated. So what’s next for lifestreams? How about aggregating all of one’s replies into a single site - yes, a replystream. […]
October 24th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
[…] Here’s an earlier post related to simplicity of setting up and maintaining the River of Rex. […]
March 1st, 2008 at 4:56 pm
[…] Recently, I re-booted RexHammock.com, a URL on which I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr.com for several months. I had determined that I was under-utilizing it as merely a “lifestream” catcher — a place that collects all the different RSS feeds generated by my various online-expressions on Twitter.com/r, Flickr.com/photos/rexblog, etc. And, with services like FriendFeed.com and even MyBlogLog getting more into being pure-play lifestream platforms, I decided to go back and figure out how to better utilize the very cool features of Tumblr. […]