This is what my friend KP Frahm called the little discussion we had on twitter last night (well, night here in Europe, afternoon for you guys). Namely Steve Rubel and Loren Feldman and for some small tweets myself as well have been talking about the question if your own real estate on the web should be and remain your centerpiece, your one place to go, the core of your online reputation. I favorited most of the conversation, so you are able to find it on twitter, here are some of the tweets: Right now there is a lot of discussion going on on both sides of the pond about lifestream and the new home in the online world, starting with Steve's last two posts on his old home Micropersuasion. While some agree, some other disagree, not always as strong as Loren, but still. For me this is indeed a question that is at the core of online reputation management and digital strategy: Should we go where the crowd is or should we build up our own real estate? This is a question we always ask in client projects as well - and there is no black or white answer to it. So following the conversation between Steve and Loren will be interesting and fun, hope they really will do it on video - and this will help us to think and rethink about our own place to be on the web. I personally e.g. use a lifestream for a long time now, right now I am experimenting with the small European service Storytlr.com, that has this cool feature of building magazine-like stories of your dezentral posts, just click on "stories" to see what I mean (and I then can embed the stories in my blog as well). But I would never give up my blog (at least for now this is my pov). I never changed it, to be honest, so I am still hosting it at blogger.com. It's my real estate on the web and will be so for a long time hopefully. A silo that is closed to the public like facebook could never be like this, and an aggregator could neither. If you process your content through a single service (like Steve does now with posterous) to post it on the several networks - or if you post decentralized and later aggregate on your liefestream (like I do), this is a question of how you work and what you like. My main question, at least from a strategic point of view, is where the center of your activity is. What is the home you would invite your friends and colleagues to. It's important to be out there and to roam around and try and play and go where my audience is or will be. But it's always good to come home from time to time. Persons, brands and companies all need a home. In the physical world as well as in the digital world. Blogs are homes. And will be.

Tim Ferriss did a presentation at WordCamp SF this year that really was just plain useful. “How to build traffic without killing yourself” is the title of the  video. You should watch it.

The Giant Squids are showing us that Summer School isn’t just for remedial math and taking organic chemistry a second time.

No, summer school Giant Squid style is about going above and beyond and innovating and building. It’s about going faster and pushing yourselves and helping each other refine the craft of making lenses. While the rest of the world is in a summery daze.

Here’s what they’ve done so far. And there are still 5 more weeks to go!

Week #1: Caption Contest Lenses
For week one, Giants in summer school had to make a Caption Contest lens (and were the first to see the brand new module). Here are just a few of the best so far:

• How To Bathe a Cat
• Rocky the Raccoon: Caption Me!
• My Wonderful West Virginia Family

Week #2: Prized Possessions Lenses
We challenged Giants to make Prized Possession lenses for week two. Why? I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard that the oddball, niche, personal review lenses are the ones that (unexpectedly) perform best. Plus, as we know, recommendations that come from personal satisfaction go a long long way. Here are some standout lenses that came out of that contest.

• A picture of my grandmother, Rose
• Whittards of Chelsea: Coffee Mugs, Cups & Teapots
• My favorite paint brushes

Week #3: Restaurant Review Lenses
This week Giants are busy getting creative with Restaurant Review “local” lenses. Check these out!

• Salsarita’s Fresh Cantina
• Judy’s on Cherry: Hearth-fired Euro Cafe
• Johnny Carinos Italian Kitchen

And hey: If you’re not one of the few who gets to take the Giant Squid Summer School challenge, maybe it’s time to ask yourself the question: What lenses could you be working on, for 5 minutes every day, while everyone else is taking the summer off?

Because of the way I work, I’m forever looking for more efficient ways to take clippings from the web and share them with my networks. I recently wrote about Evernote, which really has made it easy to save information on multiple devices. I use Skitch to annotate screen shots, and Amplify to quickly clip some content and share it on their service so others can comment on it.

kwout pulls a lot of the best features of some of these apps together in a bookmarklet that enables clipping images and text, but the cool part is you can clip a screen shot of a set of links and kwout converts the image to an image map so all the links are active. How cool is that? You can then post the info to your blog, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Evernote and a host of other sites that allow embedding.

So let’s say I want to share this post from KD Paine’s blog about the changing dynamics for Marketers and PR folks, and specifically the links to the reports she mentions. I can clip the item with kwout, send it straight to Twitter, drop it into Evernote for later use, or add it to my blog as a click able image map and a link to her site so you can read the rest of it.

How cool is that?

Once you’ve posted something using kwout you can go to their site, drop in your domain name and see a history of posted items.

I have to say I spent some time messing around with the annotation tools as well. These are 3rd party apps from Pixir and Any Canvas, and they don’t really compete with the ease of use in Skitch, but all in all this is a very cool tool, and an excellent addition to your blogging toolkit.