Yesterday, I linked to this RWW article that showcased some of the different approaches to blogging that are developing. The “Cheslow blog” was an example of lifestream/blog integration to the max.

However, one of the comments on the post is interesting in that it states: lifestreaming is not blogging.

A lifestream, the commenter says, is chronological, the blog is topical. The first one (he goes on) is full of personal stuff and inner thoughts, while the second one, the blog, deals with a person’s expertise, written out in articles. He then continues:

I don’t really care where you folks eat lunch, what you do on the weekends, what your inner thoughts are, whether your friend just found a cool site or posted some new pictures on Flickr.

Well, he (Rick, no online presence) may not care, but I think he is wrong about this.

First off though, let it be noted that true lifestreams don’t actually exist.

If you have a smartphone, and it would automatically generate posts about your geographical locations, who you emailed, who you talked to, and what was discussed — of course that would be a lifestream.

If I could make public my Google web history, and shared whatever I searched for, what I clicked and what I filled in forms for — that would be a lifestream.

If I shared all my docs, and chats, and had a video camera taped to my head for you to track how I was preparing this post — that would be, in the truest sense then, a lifestream.

To be sure, we’ve seen this happen (on Justin.tv and with the experiments of Kevin Lim) but what we are doing (sharing our thoughts, embedding our playlists and autoposting our bookmarks)… that’s a selective, manual, deliberate publicizing of events that make up the experience of our lives.

Hey, wait a minute… that’s blogging.

So no, lifestreams do not have to be personal, or deep, or innermost. And blogs aren’t always about people’s expertise. Moreover, both could be just as chronological or as topical as you like them to be — to me that’s just a presentation issue.

However, while we could now come up with yet another ‘term 2.0′ for what happens between writing posts and the streaming of experiences (the Public Interaction Tracker™ was as far as my sense of irony would go — others have gone farther)… it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that there is a shift, that there is a transition taking place, and that publishing, sharing and discussing are as interesting and as alive as ever. As I wrote yesterday: things are taking new shapes — as things tend to do.