This is what happens when you spend the better part of the day in bed, sick. You find ways to either complicate or simplify your life. My hope is that I ended up on the simple side.
Back in early 2009 I read a post by @rahsheen about a service called chi.mp. I consider Rahsheen a professor and he happens to be a member of my Twitter Hall of Fame so I signed up for it. I didn't exactly know what it would be good for. It seemed like it could be social, to connect with other chi.mp users. I could blog on it, manage contacts and post status updates from it. My excitement for it lasted for about a month. I linked some sites to it and forgot it and moved on to Flavors.me which didn't really workout either because all my feeds wouldn't work properly and I wasn't ready to pay for a premium site. So I asked a couple of questions:
What am I trying to do with my content?
Do I want all of it in one place?
If so where and what do I call it? What is it called?
Do I want to pay for it?
The decision was that I wanted one place that aggregated my content only. A place that I could send people to that shows content that I've written and content that I shared and THAT'S IT! My Twitter stream, and Facebook is really social and having all of that in the stream was really messy. That said I did want the remainder (my blogs and Google Reader shares) all in one place (which answers question 2). What I wanted was a Lifestream, more specifically a shared content stream.
I read about Lifestreaming and about moving to the "lifestream" since blogging is "dead" and all, but for me and plenty of non-technical folks who just write and share, blogging is far from dead. d. One way for people to get a glimpse at your work, and other items of interest to you in the webosphere is to aggregate it. I decided to head back to chi.mp one more time. I didn't even remember nor have record of my password and after resetting that, deleting and re-ordering my "services" I'd like to introduce to some and re-introduce to others: thesoulstreetscribe.mp .
I could have used Posterous or Tumblr or even Wordpress to aggregate my content but chi.mp is so simple. You just pick a name for your site, complete your profile, add services and you're done. No expertise, only content required. Chi.mp has a pay service in which you buy the site, I decided against it for now. Who knows one day I will eventually learn Wordpress and put it all there but as long as chi.mp is up and I can stream content there without touching it, I'm good.
Do you Lifestream or have an activity stream of your web activity/content? If so I'd like to hear from you. Let me know what works best for you and of course, since I'm not an expert, let me know about the level of dificulty in using your recommended service.
