The times, they are a changing… never more true than for the personal blog. As with most means of creating content blogging is now the domain of vanity and professionals, with an ever widening gap between the two. The demands on an individuals time are some great that the idea of sitting down and writing a full blog post is almost inconceivable any more.

Microblogging (such as Twitter) has filled the gap to some extent, making it easy to communicate ideas in a quick and succinct manner. However, this only represents a smal slice of your ideas and activities online.

LifeStreaming is the bringing together of your separate internet activities in one place. It allows you to express what you’re up to without needing to expend a huge amount of time or effort doing so - everything is automagically gathered from around the internet courtesy of the magic of feeds. In short, keep on doing what you’re doing, and share it with others via your LifeStream.

You can see an example of this by clicking on the “LifeStream” link at the top of this blog.

With each new creative outlet comes a new opportunity for the creation of experts and professionals. Look at all the people who have written poetry compared to all the people who are “poets”, and all the people who draw compared to those who are “artists”. Even artifacts of the modern age such as Twitter demonstrate a pareto curve where only the few are a “success”, leaving the remainder to be the noise in the system. Even theories such as the long tail can’t change that the majority seek “the hit”. 

Web 2.0 is often considered to be a democratizing force - perhaps it’s just the start of the next mass media channel?

This set is actually a few weeks old, which in the life of a puppy (and in fact most teenagers) is forever ago. However, as Flickr has just released the ability to embed your slideshows it seemed like a great opportunity to slap up some gratuitous doggy action shots.

Flickr slideshow embedding supports both stills and video, more details can be found here.

Steve Wozniak signs my tray loading G3 iMac, originally uploaded by Kevin Rochowski.

Steve Wozniak recently came to Cisco to give the inaugural presentation for the Technology Leaders Lecture Series, so naturally I took the opportunity to haul my huge old iMac and have it signed by the Woz himself. The fact that this piece of Apple yumminess has less than 500 MB of RAM matters little to either his Wozness or I, as not only can it still run OS 10.3 reasonably well, it can also still run the majority of web apps… slowly.

Last night Mike Arrington invited several hundred of his closest friends, twitter followers and esteemed bloggers to a private screening of the new Iron Man film staring Robert Downey Jr. Despite some legal attempts to stop the screening initially, finally sanity prevailed and the screening went ahead.

To sum up Iron Man in 100 words or less? Tony Stark is an alcoholic genius weapons manufacturer, who after almost losing his life to a terrorists and hundreds of pieces of shrapnel making their way into his heart decides to work for good and designs a suit of armor  that turns him into a superhero.  He sets out to right wrongs, blow up a lot of bad guys and battles the man who set him to be killed and has stolen the plans for his suit and made it bigger and badder. Awesomeness ensues.

Just watch it, you’ll enjoy the ride. It’s *just* on the right side of implausible.

This week I’m attending the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, and as you might expect it can be summed up in one word - exhausting. It’s not so much the sessions or wandering around the expo hall itself. It’s not even the networking, blogging or interviewing. No, it’s the parties. Oh those parties!

During Web 2.0 Expo, every company is spending out huge quantities of cash just to get that ever so important attention of yours, which according to some analysts is the basis of a new economy.  Last night was the Digg event (two words - Rock Band), and tonight is “Evolve” with mashable and chi.mp. Each night there are at least 5 different parties going, at least two of which are “launch parties”, where a previously under-the-radar startup makes their existence known. Open bars (or drink tickets at least) are the norm, and web celebrities make the rounds like move stars.

My advice to anyone else out there participating is to simply to get lots of caffeine and drink a lot of water before going to bed. Or of course, rest up early… there’s always another party tomorrow.