Seriously. One of the nicest, simplest UI’s I’ve seen in awhile. For your updates on all things Christin visit xinroman.tumblr.com. If that’s more than you can handle then just stick with me here.

The tumblr UI has really led me to rethink my feelings on the whole “lifestreaming” trend (a trend that, like most among the super geeky, seems to have lost it’s spark twice as quickly as it got it). I dunno, there’s just something so pretentious and self-indulgent about “lifestreaming.” Like it’s just a more streamlined manifestation of that fascination we all have about ourselves as we “exist” on the internet.

Or maybe I’m just not putting it in the right context — I don’t know if googling yourself has the same social stigma that it used to. It’s more about keeping tabs on your digital life and connecting with others anyway. I can name a number of times that “vanity googling” or, rather, just checking up on my inbound links has lead to new friendships (facilitated by a few pseudo-anonymous emails, of course). This is not to say that we’re not still somehow fascinated with ourselves, but being able to chart this stuff is becoming increasingly important.

On that note, there was a great project a Picnic last week, called iTea. Everyone who had a badge at the festival also had an RFID keychain type thingy, and there were various hacking stations and projects setup to do cool things with the tags. (And please do take the use of the word “cool” here with a grain of salt. In reality some of the workshops were bordering on corporate and scary.)

So, iTea is a tea cup that tells all about you, sort of like having your tea leaves read. What it’s really doing though, is searching the internet for your name (kind of like that game we’ve all played where you google the phrase “Christin Roman is” and laugh at what comes up). The results were mixed, but what I found most interesting, in my case, was that I knew exactly where each reference was coming from, and wether or not it was really about me, or about some other Christin Roman (of which there are very few, but one of them is some sort of German folk songstress of sorts, so her stuff tends to come up a bit high).

I can’t say that I’m embarrassed that I know all of this just from googling my own name (in fact, I think that this process is what really should be streamlined, more so than just subscribing to a feed of search results for your own name) but I do know that at one time it was considered a little tacky. Now take “lifestreaming,” which, is just the opposite – instead of getting a feed of what other people are saying about me, I’m assuming that all of my friends want to know at all times what I have to say about, well, everything, as it’s related to me – and think about how tacky that is. Maybe we’ve all just finally accepted the fact that we are obsessed with ourselves, and I guess I’m okay with that. But it’s the delusion that other people should be obsessed with us too that’s a little scary.