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From today’s Twitter stream, more juxtaposition:

Gabriela Avram: #LmkTH You’re half way through, and you’re all doing a fantastic job! Keep on the good work!

Laura Dragan: 50% done – #21k in 2h30min – not looking fwd to the hills that are coming :) sun still shining ..loving it!

I’m amused because Gabriela’s comment about the Limerick Tweasure Hunt could be a great reply to Laura’s Connemara marathon status update.

Sometimes it’s the juxtaposition that amuses me:

Tweetie

Jill Gengler: I love being able to save someone’s bacon.

Tom Coates: The great slab of fatty pork that I presume to call a brain is almost totally recumbent this morning. Come on piggy! Do some thinking!

We’re making progress at archiving individual streams, I think. But the overall conversation, “what was I seeing then”, and the links between things? Needs work, at least chez moi!

Updated 2010-04-14 to fix typos. :)

Streams aren’t new. Funding for streams, though, that’s new.

MediaCommons has just announced funding from the NEH to create “digital portfolios”:
“Given this proliferation, what we need as scholars may be less a system that will manage our communication for us than a system that will allow us to manage our communication, a system than recognizes that the key aspect of scholarly communication into the future may be less the distribution of the products of our research than the management of the social networks through which our research is distributed.” [emphasis mine] MediaCommons as Digital Scholarly Network: Unveiling the Profile System. Via @kfitz.

So scholars don’t have to roll their own,¹ or depend on dubiously-funded startups.²

While the announcement implies “less is more”, Kathleen’s sample profile strikes me as a lifestream. Streams themselves are more “more” than “less”. (‘Firehose’ comes to mind.) So streams alone aren’t going to solve scholarly communication. But streams can be sliced and diced any number of ways. First the data. Then, if there’s interest, maybe some services.

1. Personally I’m all for rolling your own. At least in theory. The first lifestream I ever noticed was code4lib’ber Mark Matienzo’s self-hosted planet , which aggregates his blog posts (both personal and work), tweets, youtube uploads, delicious bookmarks, and last.fm scrobbles. Brilliant, but thus far I’ve been too shy & lazy to follow suit. [↩]
2. FriendFeed popularized lifestreams. When Facebook bought FriendFeed back in August, my networks of librarians and scientists had several discussions of alternatives for scientists and other scholars. [↩]