Owning Your Social Media

lifestreaming-sweetcron-sea

I've just put some of the final touches on my personal lifestream install of Sweetcron. I'm now aggregating all activity from the services I use most. They include my blog, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Seesmic. I'm also scraping a Google Ego Search to pickup whenever someone says my name.  I'm loving this for a few reasons:

• Flow: The setup makes it beyond simple to follow and review my social activity. Much like having my own custom FriendFeed.

• Self Hosted: This all runs from my server, not someone else's. I control the input/output and layout to any degree I choose.

• Archive: I always say social media is autobiographical in nature. Now I have a backup of that activity just in case.

• Capturing the Discussion: With a service like Disqus, conversation can now occur directly here, on my domain. You can see an example of this from some testing I did. 

• My Own Fire Hose: For my favorite stalkers, I give you the Sean Percival Fire Hose. This RSS feed captures just about all of my activity online. It of course brings you back here to see each item.

• Better Net: It is much easier to drive traffic to a domain then a social network profile. Here I have the most freedom and flexibility with my content. Once here I can also easily direct someone to an external presence with a few "follow me here" or "add me there" links.

Rethinking Personal Branding:

Blogs and social media sites will always be a big part of personal branding. That being said don't forget to create your own personal space too, something you own instead of rent. Don't just throw up a blog that you never update, give it some life even when you aren't around. 

You're creating all this content after all, why not capture some of it back for yourself? 

Please let me know your thoughts on this setup in the comments. If you're interested in aggregating yourself or business.

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