If you are anything like me you are scattered about the internet. Its just one of those things that has happened over tim. I’ve had a personal site at www.safuto.com for many years. A few years ago I signed up for a Flickr account. Then MySpace and Facebook, YouTube, Twitter plus a couple of blogs and all of a sudden little bits of me were scattered across cyberspace.

Over the last year I’ve made several half-hearted attempts at pulling it all together. At the beginning of this month I decided to do a better job of organizing my ‘lifestream’ as I’ve heard others call it. You may have noticed (but likely not) that I’ve added a lifestream page and sidebar block to this blog.

The purpose of the lifestream is a simple one. You utilize a tool (more on that in a minute) to help you pull together some or all of the content that you publish in a variety of places around the internet. This gives people who are interested in you (or your business) a central point of contact for everything you publish. Good idea, no? From my perspective the lifestream is all about making things easier for those who want to follow you, wherever you may go on the web.

I’ve done a bit of research into the lifestream subject as I’ve tinkered with the different possibilities for bringing it all together. Hopefully I can save you some time by pointing you to some of the tools that I’ve discovered and/or experimented with during this process.

It is best to approach the set of lifestream tools from the perspective of your level of skill in manipulating web based applications.

Plug and Play - You’re the type of user who wants to log on to a service and get on with it. You don’t like fiddling around with downloads or databases and the like. Have no fear. There are a growing list of free services to choose from that will help you to create a lifestream for you or your organization. Have a look at Jaiku, FriendFeed or Tumblr. All three are very simple to use and gaining in popularity.

Intrepid but Limited - You like to tinker around under the hood but don’t want to tear into PHP code or templates. Check out Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes is a free service that allows you to (among many other things) aggregate multiple feeds into a single view. You even get an RSS feed from your completed ‘pipe’. The best part is that you won’t need to build a lifestream from scratch. Pipes allows you to clone other people’s pipes. So you are welcome to head over to my lifestream pipe and clone the heck out of it.

Brave and Skilled - You like messing around with online databases. You know a thing or two about the inner workings of your CMS. You can handle hacking a blog theme a little bit. There are several interesting choices for you. SimplePie is a tool I’ve found recently that does an excellent job of aggregating feeds. You can use SimplePie as a standalone application or utilize the WordPress Plugin to integrate with a WP blog as I have done here. There are also SimplePie plugins for Drupal, Joomla and Facebook among others.

You also have option of utilizing other plug-ins for WordPress and Drupal. WordPress has an aggregator plug-in called Feed WordPress that works quite well. Drupal comes with a core Aggregator Module that I’ve used an works well also.

I’m sure that there are other tools and services out there that can achieve the lifestream that works for you or your organization. So please feel free to add those in the comments or blog about them on your own site. My hope is that what I’ve written here can be the first step in helping you to ‘pull it all together’ on the web.

[Author's Note: I was inspired to write this post after reading and commenting on a post by Shel Holtz titled, "Will Businesses Adopt Lifestreams?"]