As I predicted .. Lifelogs are coming…

March 12th, 2004

I call it a Lifelog — Nokia calls it a “Lifeblog” (my terminology is better) — but it’s the same idea — a log of all the stuff you experience — your whole life, blogged and online. OK but the key is to make sure I can keep my lifeblog private — or at least parts of it private! I would like my camera phone to take a photo every minute and add it to my Lifelog automatically. Then I can speed through it flip-book-animation style to get to a section I am interested in. Next would be to add a digital streaming voice recorder to my phone and record whatever is being said on every phone call, and even when I am not on a call at 1 minute intervals. Using voiceprints and speech-to-text we can then index who was speaking and what was said as a way to search and navigate the Lifelog — for example, this would make it possible to find all photos that correspond to times when Sue was speaking about “Internet.” With a little more work we could link this to additional semantics and make it really searchable.

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  • http://teknos.typepad.com Josh Kirschenbaum

    There are a trilogy of sci-fi novels by Robert Sawyer called The Neanderthal Parallax (REALLY good books)- but there is a civilization which have “Companions” surgically implanted into them at birth. The Companion is an AI that records a 3D hologram with audio of every moment of your life, and archives it to a private storage space. At any time, you may review your archive, and decide to make parts public.
    The upside of the Companions is that crime is non-existent. Since every moment of your life is documented, it would be impossible for you to commit a crime, or have a crime imposed upon you.
    Interesting stuff- perhaps Lifelogs are version 0.9 of this…

  • Laura Jennings

    I imagine someone could come up with a way to augment or modify someones lifelog…what crime would that be? what if the change was an improvement?
    this reminds me of a quote I read in wired a while back:
    “What I say to people who don’t like to think about many-dimensional spaces is that classical information is like the information in a book and quantum information is more like the information in a dream,” Bennett said.
    “If you have a dream and somebody asks you about it, there’s a certain privacy to it. Pretty soon, you’re remembering your explanations rather than what the dream originally was. So in the course of making it public and making many copies of it, the original content of it is altered in an unpredictable way.”
    Charles Bennett of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center