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Entries in MyLifeBits (7)

Thursday
Nov012012

Lifelogging Taxonomy: Extreme lifelogging by 2020

I'm fond of building taxonomies to aid understanding where a field or things are and where progress is likely to lead.  The need to define "extreme lifelogging" came up in the summer of 2009 when speaking to the New Scientist. I claim that everyone with a computer isdoing lifelogging to some degree, creating memories--provided they aren't deleting.   I then claimed that in 10 years, continuous life recording of everything being seen would be common in 2020 --this is extreme lifelogging

Since we started using or wearing SenseCams in 2003, when someone sees me for the first time, they invariably ask: "Where's the camera that's recording everything?"  Thus the discussion in 2009 prompted the definition of the recording of everything we ever see as Extreme Lifelogging (almost).  When we also capture sound i.e. conversations, it is even more extreme. 

In defining extreme lifelogging it is critical to show the various degrees and facets of capturing everything aka lifelogging. 

So hear's verson 0.9 of a taxonomy... in some sense ordered by degree:

Implicit, light lifeloggingstore and retain everything your computer has seen for record keeping, recall

Professional lifelogging --maintaince of corporate and personal communication and records, etc.

Lifelong learned logging retention of books, magazines and journals read, courses taken

Personal and Family lifelogging

Social lifelogging communication, ideas, etc. are spread everywhere e.g. FB, LinkedIn, Yammer

Health-Wellness lifelogging. Quantitative Self Movement is aimed at constant tracking of health bits

Transcribing all notes from conversations & thoughts lifelogging - Thad Starner c1983-

Extreme lifelogging everything you see and hear. 
Lifelog Tracks aka lifetrack aka lifetrek

After-life Lifelogging  Only your avatar knows. TBD

Institutional lifelogging  e.g. LoC, British Library

Property lifelogging… a catalog of life's stuff

 

Friday
Aug052011

Memolane: A MyLifeBits for bits you thought were lost at all of your social networks

Memolane is a social network for memories.  It allows you to see all your online social content in one place by pulling it into a beautiful timeline of your online life.  It's like a scrapbook that creates itself.  You can go back in time and see your first ever posts to Facebook, Twitter, photo sites, etc.  

You can look at my own public Memolane at www.memolane.com/gordonbell to get an idea of how it picks up content to create an aggregate timeline of some aspects of your public life.

 

Basically, Memolane allows you to get your life as projected into cyberspace and project whatever aspects you want on a nice timeline. g

Tuesday
Apr062010

First Camera, Then Fork. NY Times article by Kate Murphy

Ms. Murphy describes the fact that people are photographing their food as a growing trend. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/dining/07camera.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

She opens with a story about a neuroscientist who has 9000 photographs of everything he has eaten in the last five years--after he lost 80 pounds, as a method of self motivation. She states that Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Flickr has 300K food photos from 19,000 of its members.  Other motivators include match making. voyeurism, just plain showing off, or whatever as a way of filling your facebook page while filling your face, or in general documenting another part of your life just like we advocate.

I was able to resonate with this trend and then went back to look at trips in France beginning in the late 70s when memorable meals were photographed and logged in terms of price performance-- correlating taste with the Michelin food tasters.  Since then, I tend to photograph all meals eaten at restaurants including the check, and especially memorable "restaurant quality" home cooking. Just a month ago, faced with the first course of a potentially memorable 7-course degustation menu meal at our favorite Japanese restaurant. I had no option but to run home (across the street), get the camera, and arrive back to photograph and enjoy.

SenseCam also greps these photos too. Wearing it while dining allows you to see a plate of food disappear. If only it would analyze the calories.  In a way, I get this by estimating my calories burned and adjusting it by the weight gain when I step on the scales!

I have little urge to do anything other than to savor the screen saver recollection. Like virtually all of MyLifeBits, these photos are for me. However, if you saw the photos, you would conclude like the people in the article-we all like to eat. I just wish my body and heart wouldn't mind so much.

Tuesday
Mar302010

SenseCam Browser released

Whenever I talk about Total Recall, people ask: "won't you get swamped by all that data?" It’s a great question. If it takes automatic capture to get close to logging everything, it will also take automatic organization, and, even more importantly, automatic summarization to deal with the scale of one's lifelog. So, my Total Recall presentation isn't complete without showing off the great work by Aiden Doherty, Alan Smeaton and others from Dublin City University (DCU).

The DCU SenseCam browser takes the several thousand pictures that a SenseCam can generate in a day, and produces a daily diary. The idea is to look for novelty as a proxy for interestingness. Faces and clothing patches are recognized, and they ask: are these the same old faces, or new ones? Looking accelerometer values, and taking location from a separate GPS into account, they can also distinguish movements that are out of the ordinary. The end result shows snapshots of your day, with the pictures of more interesting events taking up more space. When you put your mouse over an event’s picture, a time-lapse style video plays of all the pictures from that event.

Now the DCU SenseCam browser is being made public. Check out the SenseCam browser site for source code and links to more information about the project. This first public release doesn’t include the image comparison, but they have actually found they can get within a few percent of the same answers without it. But this release is just the start as they’ve got the capability to add in much more functionality, such as event importance or visual event search ... stay tuned for more!

 

Friday
Jan152010

Wipe The Slate Clean in 2010, use the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

Lifelogging is what we advocate. Life Blogging is what many of us also engage in indirectly by being a member of a social network that allows us to blab about anything we do, hear, see, think, etc. and converse with 10s, 100s, or even 10,000s of friends we never knew.  At some point the distraction may be just too great and you decide to get a life. This means you leave those sites and delete your friends, etc. Here's how to do it... by removing certain parts of your life from cyberspace, according to this article in Tech Crunch http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/31/web-2-0-suicide/

"Are you tired of living in public, sick of all the privacy theater the social networks are putting on, and just want to end it all online? Now you can wipe the slate clean with the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine . (Warning: This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable). Just put in your credentials for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or LinkedIn and it will delete all your friends and messages, and change your username, password, and photo so that you cannot log back in.

The site is actually run by Moddr , a New Media Lab in Rotterdam, which execute the underlying scripts which erase your accounts. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is a digital Dr. Kevorkian. On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends one by one, removes your groups and joins you to its own “Social Network Suiciders,” and lets you leave some last words. So far 321 people have used the site to commit Facebook suicide. On Twitter, it deletes all of your Tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It doesn’t actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest."