I have come across my first real problem with this “lifestreaming” thing… namely that streams are flat. As might be expected, the complexity of real world experience is difficult to distill into a stream where every piece of data possesses equal weight. Currently there is no way – via (mainly rss) streams – to create a digital representation of “me” that captures the subtleties and nuances that are “me” in the real world.

Take, for instance, my tumblr stream at mturro.tumblr.com – it’s dominated by music. Every few minutes it pulls the most recently played tracks from my Last.fm feed and displays them as if they were in fact posts. The net effect of this (and why I leave Last.fm data out of the RSS “lifestream” generated on my own site) is that to the casual observer it would seem that my life is by and large about music. While music is certainly a major part of my life it is so in a primarily background way. The fact that I’m listening to Ben Harper right now doesn’t really say as much about me as it does about an environmental aspect of a certain point in my unfolding life. Granted, sometimes the song I’m listening to may have resonance beyond that point, but that is when I’ll Tweet it (or blog about it if it’s really poignant).

Obviously there are ways to fine tune the stream and to make it a closer representation of “me” – and indeed in my main stream I have gone beyond the kind of ham-fisted approach that is on display at my tumblr page. Still, even in this refined state the stream lacks any sort of context. If I am on some sort of kitsch kick and ironically spin a slew of ABBA tunes, my Last.fm data will pick up that fact. Critical information gets lost in the stream through… the irony gets stripped and I become true ABBA fan (if such an animal exists anymore). I can choose not to send that particular set of data to Last.fm, but then I’m not really any closer of creating a digital “me” – am I? There must be a way to convey the kitsch and the irony along with just the ID3 information… no?

Ultimately there needs to be a way past this sort of one dimensional stream and toward a more complex and layered flow of data that more closely resembles real world experience. Hopefully, in the same way that emoticons have evolved to convey emotion in written communication, a method will evolve to breathe complexity and nuance into lifeless data streams… perhaps it’s already here and I’m just missing it. Either way I suspect that if its to do the job I want it will be slightly more sophisticated than or .