We all now live in an interconnected world.  We all have various platforms in which we broadcast ourselves to the world on a daily and sometimes second, by second and minute by minute basis.  Stream media is not a new a concept, however I’m creating my own interpretation of what it means.

My definition of stream media is the way in which we communicate via various platforms using our activity streams and data flows on sites such as twitter, facebook, Posterous & Tumblr. When doing my research I came across the term lifestream

The term lifestream was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelernter at Yale University in the mid-1990s to describe “…a time-ordered stream of documents that functions as a diary of your electronic life; every document you create and every document other people send you is stored in your lifestream.

Lifestreams are also referred to as social activity streams or social streams.  You can read more about activity streams from an earlier post.  The tail of your stream contains documents from the past (starting with your electronic birth certificate). Moving away from the tail and toward the present, your stream contains more recent documents — papers in progress or new electronic mail; other documents (pictures, correspondence, bills, movies, voice mail, software) are stored in between. Moving beyond the present and into the future, the stream contains documents you will need: reminders, calendar items, to-do lists.”

In terms of social network aggregators sites such as sweetcron and Lifestream, use a plugin for the popular blogging and CMS platformsn like WordPress, which adapt Freeman and Gelernter’s original concept to address the vast flows of personal information and exchange created by social network services such as MySpace or Facebook

Other online applications have emerged to facilitate a user’s lifestream. Posterous offers a variety of unique features to enhance its basic blogging function. Tumblr is a similar concept, but with slightly different features.

A good friend of my Sam Sethi is an exponent of activity streams and data flow methodologies. From meeting him recently my understanding of the web and how we currently and will in the future commuincate has become clear. Our activities will become transparent only to those of whoever we wish to let into our spehres or zones.

Keys words you should be watching out for will be Authenticity, identifcation, privacy linked data. You should also watch out for our old friend Google who will be analysising our search results  and relating them to relevancy and context within the semantic web.  The question is whether or not you will be willing or able to get your feet wet in the metaphorical media stream?

Also check out @gravity7 blog post about social media converging streams

Haven’t heard of them?  You will soon.  Here’s a presentation on the subject