Forget about prosthetic memory. Lifelogging, ironically, is dead!
Forget about prosthetic memory. Lifelogging, ironically, is dead!
But "lifeblogging" is the way to go. Let me explain.
Remember lifelogging? It's a longtime techno-visionary dream of capturing all the details of one's life digitally for total instant recall, personal growth and posterity.
Over the years, many products including wearable cameras, software and online services promised to enable lifelogging, but none really caught on.
What seems to have replaced it for many people is social media oversharing, plus tech company tracking, quantified-self products and endless smartphone picture-taking.
These aren't really lifelogging solutions because they cannot be used for easily recalling things, and they can't be relied upon for posterity.
More data is being collected than the lifelogging futurists predicted. Sadly it's not really available to us for the purpose of lifelogging.
After many fits and starts over the years, I've finally arrived at my own half-assed solution. I'll tell you all about that. But let me tell you about why lifelogging is a great idea.
One lifelogging pioneer was Gordon Bell, a computer science pioneer who started at DEC ended up working as a researcher at Microsoft in the 90s. He wrote one of the definitive books on lifelogging called Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.
As part of his MyLifeBits experiment, Bell wore two cameras around his neck all his waking hours. One that took a picture every 20 seconds, and the other that took pictures or videos when he pressed the button. He also digitized his articles, books, letters, memos, photos, presentations, music, home movies, and lectures, as well as his phone calls, emails, web pages visited.
That was a research project. For enthusiast consumers like me, the industry churned out all kinds of lifelogging products, including Google Glass, Narrative Clip and also apps that helped in the cause of lifelogging, such as Foursquare. An app called Saga let you recall your location, and add photos and other information to annotate the places you went to, for example.
Nearly all the lifelogging products folded from lack of public interest. Even Gordon Bell told me when I interviewed him a few years ago that the whole lifelogging project "wasn't something that was bringing a lot of value to my life."
For me, the ultimate lifelogging tool was Google+ because it integrated email, video, private messages and private and public posts into a single searchable stream. I captured everything with Google Glass, and marked each post as public, for a small circle only, or for my eyes only. I saw and could search the whole repository of knowledge, but the public could see only my public posts. When Google killed it, they enabled users to download all their posts, which of course I did. But I find it nearly impossible to access or use the download.
(The picture with this post was taken a few years ago while floating in the Dead Sea on the Jordan side — that's Israel in the distance. Later, I would lose my wedding ring in Mexico City. But I still have this photos. That's the beauty of wearable camera lifelogging.)
One notable exception to the termination of lifelogging services is one called Digi.me, which seeks to bring together wearable data, social sharing, location information, personal health tracking and other data into one place where you can use that data in specific ways.
Ultimately, the problems of lifelogging are:
It's not easy to do
Everyone suffers from information overload already
The benefits aren't clear, or haven't been demonstrated in the minds of users
The public doesn't trust companies with private data
What's needed is a service that *automatically* brings in social posts, location histories, smartphone pictures, and offers the ability to send or upload any text, document, photo, video or note and add it to the mix.
Then, the information should be quickly searchable, and also presented in multiple ways, such as chronological order, location-centric and people-focused (where you can plug in a name and see all past interactions).
It's probably never going to happen because the system is hard to monetize, disparate companies don't like being open or working together for the benefit of users, and also because the public is unlikely to trust a company with all that data.
And so I've given up on lifelogging.
Instead, I'm embracing "lifeblogging," which is to say a public blog that's focused on capturing specific details and moments of my life.
The key for me is a blogging service called Posthaven.
Posthaven is like a regular blogging service, with three exceptions that make it as good as it can be for lifeblogging:
You can post via email, which means it's easy to post from any device.
It automatically resizes pictures, so posting is fast and easy.
Posthaven keeps blog posts alive forever. Their main mission is that they'll never go away, and they'll never delete your posts, even if you stop paying them and stop using their service.
My Posthaven lifeblog is at elgan.com. The blog has links to the stuff I write, plus pictures and comments on my everyday experiences, observations and ideas. In short, it's a chronicle of the things that I'm thinking about, big and small. As such, it's just part of the lifelogging vision. But to me, it's the most important part.
I do other writing for other people. I write for technology professionals, technology enthusiasts and interested laypeople. I write for travelers on our Gastronomad blog. I interact with journalists and colleagues on Twitter and Linkedin.
But I publish my lifeblog at elgan.com for myself, and secondarily for anyone else who's interested to see it. But mostly it's for me. And that's what makes it a lifeblog.