Living The Networked Life: The Extremes of Beat Blogging

Next week I have a lunch date with Kevin Lim who will be in town for MacWorld. The interesting part of this meeting is that you can suggest where we eat.

I found out Kevin Lim would be in town because I recently started  subscribing to the RSS of my Facebook friends’ update feed, a trick I learned from Eric Eldon, another "beat blogger" at Venture Beat.

Kevin lives a networked life. Go ahead and visit his blog. Right away you’ll notice a video playing on the right hand side. If Kevin is at his computer, the video is live – and it’s him typing. Below that Plugoo, a widget that allows for live chatting on your blog with any visitor.

Kevin calls himself a "social cyborg." He writes:

I call myself a "Social Cyborg", a human meshed with technology to network on any media / anywhere. My presence is augmented by the minds of many, with my decisions polled from the opinions of friends (real time crowdsourcing). I can’t afford to do it all the time, so it’s mostly at specific events, like the upcoming MacWorld Expo.

Social Cyborg’s Principles:

1. Continuous Partial Presence:
Loved ones feel as if I am actually close by when I’m far away (i.e.
emotive telepresence)

2. Live Crowdsourcing:
Friends have contacted me and augmented what I’m doing

3. Public Therapy:
The idea that I’d be mindful of bad habits since my life is visible to all.

4. Redefinition of Privacy:
Privacy is a broad term, so here I am trying to find boundaries.

5. Memory Prosthetic:
I can opt to record moments of my life on video, and search by date,
time, subject matter, etc.

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Related links:
How to never forget: The story behind Kevin‘s wearable cameras (demo)
http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=1693

When he goes around with a camerae he isn’t necessarily acting on his own will, at least, he doesn’t want to. His goal is to report on events for other people – literally talking to and attending events that they want him to. If you can’t go to MacWorld but want somebody to report on precisely what you tell them to – Kevin is your conduit.

I’m not suggesting newspaper reporters go to the same extremes as Kevin Lim, which in my mind is about performance art as well as reporting, I’m highlighting it to show how extreme social reporting can be taken. Just take a look at his use of Google Calenders and Jaiku.