wanderingstan

I’ve written before about the transition from blogging to microblogging to implicit blogging. My clickstream is my implicit blog. In other words, the answer to the question “What is Stan doing right now?” is best answered by the URL I am currently viewing.

So…I had to build it. Here’s what it looks like:

Click the image about to try it, or go to http://wanderingstan.com/live_attention/index.html.

Spurred by a brainstorm session with Jonas Goldstein, I emailed Cluztr founder Jon about how a little javascript could allow anyone to follow an attentionstream with needing a download. So he whipped up a new JSON API, and I had no choice but to build it. (Thanks again, Jon!)

Disclaimers: It’s still kinda flakey. Some sites will break out of the frameset. I’m working on some ways around this.

This is one piece of my blog overhaul where I want to bring some order to all my attention streams, both incoming and outgoing. Hope to have this up soon.

So give this a whirl, let me know of any problems.

I’m online and surfing most days between 9 and 6 mountain standard time.

ps- Any recommendations for a good thumbnail service?

Twitter has aptly been called “microblogging”. In a previous post, I wondered what the next step in self-revelation would be. At the time I suggested “Maybe something that reads your physiological state directly.”

I overshot the mark.

Twitter answers the question, “What are you doing right now?” But if you’re online (as you are at this moment), that’s a question that can be answered with a single URL. The answer for you right now is:
http://wanderingstan.com/2007-03-27/microblogging_to_implicit_blogging

A simple listing of pages you visit constitutes a very micro and very automatic blog.

Consider these new companies and their taglines:

• atten.tv - “Watch what people are watching.”
• Cluztr - “Share your linkstream with your friends.”
• Me.dium - “Reveal the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser.

Is this form of implicit blogging (nanoblogging?) interesting to anyone? It’s hard to say. Even the 140 characters of twitter reveal some personality of the twitterer. Nothing like that in a stream of URL’s.

But as Twitter-founder Evan is quick to point out, the same “Who will care?” doubts were raised in the initial days of Blogging and are now seen on Twitter. In the long tail of attention, perhaps even a stream of URL’s from the right personality can find an audience.