I’ve seen this story crop up a number of places this weekend: Lifelogging. This version from “The Raw Feed:”
Smile when you talk to research legend Gordon Bell. You’re on candid camera.
Bell wears two cameras around his neck all his waking hours. One of them he calls a SenseCam. It takes a digital photograph every 20 seconds or so — all day, every day, year after year. Soon you’ll be able to buy a SenseCam of your own. (I’ll tell you where – follow the link.)
This automated capturing of your life’s events is called Lifelogging. It will take many forms, but I predict it will become a major trend — like Facebook.
It’s a cool idea, and I agree with Mike Elgan, this will indeed turn into a big thing – but not just because it’s the next biggest hype point on the technology train.
If you follow the larger trends in Web, the overplot has been one immersed in the idea of sharing seamlessly. The sites and companies that do the best are ones that make it easy and more effortless to share. First it was the bookmarklet. Then it was keyboard commands. Then, integrated communications and discovery. Finally, with Twitter, it meant taking sharing to the as of yet-ultimate invisible platform: the smartphone.
Devices like the one Gordon Bell uses that not only record and upload, but auto-tag and classify daily activities will become en vogue, not because we are chronic over-sharers, but because all our data is ultimately useful to us or people who care about us. Reality and virtual are converging upon one another, and devices like these are the bridges.
