Yongfook is a web producer based in Tokyo

Posted on January 14th, 2008 at 3:26 pm

Hokay. So what are you looking at?

Yongfook.com is now a continually (and automatically) updated stream of my activity across the various websites I interact with. When I put a photo on flickr, it appears here too. When I bookmark something, it shows up here. Same with youtube, twitter and so on - all automatically using the magic of the internets. I also add some content directly, like these blog posts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I interact with my website and with Wordpress and conventional blogging and I think I’ve been fighting a paradigm that no longer suits a user like me. This site now runs on a custom platform that uses Code Igniter and the Tumblr API. More about that in my next blog post.

Anyway lets rewind.

5 years ago, we didn’t have services like flickr. There may have been services that let you share photos, but being able to pull the data out via RSS or an API is a much more recent development in the web world. So 5 years ago, when I took a photo that I wanted to share, I might have uploaded it somewhere and then constructed a blog post and hit “publish”. That’s two actions that we can now condense into one, thanks to an increased ease of data portability.

It makes so much more sense for me this way. We interact with various websites and create content on them - why should I then have to come to my own website and reconstruct, repost or repackage the same content? It already exists out there on the internet, and it’s grabbable and usable.

This is not to say I think conventional blogging is dead. I do however think it is evolving. The pace at which we consume and create content - photos, videos, links etc - is getting faster, more frequent. If we wanted to republish everything manually on our blogs, we’d just run out of time.

In addition, I found that the conventional “category” or “tag” system for labeling blog posts became increasingly irrelevant to me as an individual user. As an individual blogger this system of tagging and categorising is so subjective and non-standard that you go from blog to blog and often find categories that you just plain don’t know what they are until you click on them and start reading.

So I’ve made the move to define content by type, not by an ambiguous set of keywords. Video is video. Photo is photo. It’s obvious, and you can quickly scan the page to see if there is anything you like based on the visual theme of each content type.

I understand the need to keep tagging and categorising. Perhaps you write about a lot of different topics and you need to really segment it all out to help people keep up. I’m not that kind of blogger. I just want to share different types of content, and if you click a “blog” post, well it’s a lucky dip as to what theme it’s going to be. It sounds more chaotic, but that’s what the Lifestream is - it’s lots of different types of content in a jumble, just like the actual activity patterns of the person behind it.

There’s advantages and disadvantages to this.

The pace is a lot quicker, and I think it’s a far more personal experience than reading a pristinely edited blog. However if you’re looking to consume long article after long article, you’ll be disappointed. I’m still going to be blogging, but in between the blog posts you’ll get a bunch of other content. Videos I like, or that feature me, updates from my twitter (so you know exactly what I’m doing at all times…), new photos, quotes that I find inspiring or funny and more. I think it’s a win-win; you get more content and I get to share more stuff automatically.

So welcome to the new Yongfook.com, my Lifestream. All the old content can still be found at archive.yongfook.com and all your old bookmarks will redirect accordingly.

Lets consider this an experiment. It’s not perfect yet, the concept is still in “beta”, but I think for me it is a step in the right direction.

Yongfook