With the Web 2.0 goodness, we are leaving tracks everywhere. Your photos are on FlickR, your videos on YouTube, your tweets are on Twitter, Identi.ca or Plurk (if you hopped on that passing craze). Your song choices are on LastFM or Pandora, links you like are on Digg or StumbleUpon and your blog posts are on WordPress, Tumblr or any of the other providers.
And all of this is *your* data. You created it, it is a piece of you – what you were thinking, looking at, watching, saying or reading at a moment in your life. I, for one, want a record of that.
I know there are websites that will aggregate that for you, but again – it is being aggregated somewhere else – someone else now owns your precious data and to get it you have to log in, sign up and hand them tons of information.
So I decided to just aggregate everything myself. It took a fair bit of investigation to figure out how exactly I wanted to configure things – enough to deserve a separate, followup post. But now I have what I want.
And voila – the new tab on my blog. In The Moment.
In The Moment is what I named my Tumblr blog when I started it. At that point, Tumblr was my repository for all my data – my blog posts, my tweets, everything. I’ve now repurposed it to collect all my non-blog “lifestream” data [Updated – i.e. the In The Moment tab *is* my Tumblog and the RSS feeds pull in all my dispersed data]. Right now it is mainly tweets, but all other things will be added in as well.
In The Moment is still a bit of work in process. Skinning my Tumblog to look like my main blog was more work with CSS than I had expected and there are little nits I am working through.
But it is up and it is active. And it is me… as I live in the moment.