I was inspired by Gregarious’ post on the pervasiveness of streams. Streams to me represent another step towards the end of top-down broadcast and the beginning of a confluence of information and communication exchange patterns that function multi-dimensionally. At this point, anyone who is active with social platforms and social tools has streams of information revolving around them. Streams are pervasive, (as Gregarious points out) in that they persist in cyberspace long after we take the actions that add to our streams.

Streams are like our digital ghosts, wandering around the rolling landscapes of the internet. They are the imprint we leave behind as we preform our every action. Our thoughts and opinions exist in the form of RSS streams, from our blogs and micro-media sites like Twitter. The content we enjoy is represented by the streams emanating from social bookmarking and user-generated content sites like Digg, Delicious and YouTube. Our “real-world” activities are tracked by event and travel sites like Upcoming, Eventful and Dopplr. The music we listen to is ferried across the digital universe by services such as Last.fm, Pandora and Blip. There are streams floating around in cyberspace for almost every aspect of our personality, daily activities and character that you can imagine.

The analysis of these streams as they pertain to any individual (assuming they are active in the social space) can begin to paint a fairly accurate picture of someone. In some cases they can give a decent indication on one’s world-view. But what about when you separate these streams from the people they are linked to and look at them as a data type? Rather than looking at “Jackie’s digital ghost” we look at the aggregate data from the digital ghosts’ of everyone within a particular community, demographic, psychographic or affinity group. The uses for these streams is only recently being realized.

In addition to their potential as a data type, I also see streams as representations of the multi-dimensional conversations that happen within the social web. If we envision the social web as just that, a web, with each strand being comprised of a stream of information, with each connection point representing a place where these streams intersect: a connection to a friend, multiple people going to the same event, listening to the same song, bookmarking the same site, and so on. Where it begins to get interesting is when you start to see how people, businesses, brands and products can interact with these streams.

Streams can be created.
Streams can be monitored.
Streams can be fed.
Streams can be redirected.
Streams can be aggregated.
Streams can be analyzed and parsed.
Streams can be broadcast.
Streams can be categorized, sorted and promoted.

Brian Solis, Gregarious Narain and I have proposed a panel for SXSW that will address the above, and then some. It’s up on the panel picker right now. If this topic is of interest to you, please visit the site and vote for our panel:

A Discussion on the Pervasiveness of Streams

Presenters: Brian Solis, Jackie Peters, Gregarious Narain

Description
The emergence of streams in our digital lives is, in many ways, aligning our thinking in a way that we are only subtly appreciating. Streams represent the end of top-down broadcast and the beginning of a confluence of information and communication exchange patterns that function multi dimensionally.