Lifelogging

Lifelogging = the continuous logging and recording of life events so that the daily experiences of connected group members can be shared

Article at http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i23/23a03001.htm

Examples of lifelogging software are Twitter and Jaiku

Description

Lifelogging software enables "Social Peripheral Vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss. Even just the simple knowledge that your loved ones are ok can have a lot of emotional value in an increasingly unstable world." (http://www.606tech.com/fullarticle.php?artid=492)

Background

Why it is needed

From an interview with the founders of Jaiku at http://www.606tech.com/fullarticle.php?artid=492

"In 2006 the two founders - Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen -realized we both wanted a better way to share what we were doing in real life with our friends online. Although we spent a lot of time on blogs and Web services built by our friends, like Flickr, we felt they were too cumbersome to update and difficult to read on our mobile phones. We decided to make a service that regular people would use every day, that was quicker to update on the go and would enable all of us to see what our family members, friends, and colleagues were doing simply by glancing at our handset." (http://www.606tech.com/fullarticle.php?artid=492)

History

From http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i23/23a03001.htm:

"Lifeloggers trace their history back to 1945, when Vannevar Bush, a prominent American scientist, wrote an essay for The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think." Scientists deal with an increasingly unmanageable trove of data and other information, Mr. Bush wrote, but technology could help. Mr. Bush imagined scientists wearing little cameras on their heads to record lab work. He conjured an image of a desklike machine that could store thousands of pages a day in microfilm. He called his device a memory extender, or "memex" — a term that some researchers use today to describe their own suite of lifelogging tools.

In the 1990s, MIT's Media Lab began dabbling in lifelogging through wearable computers, under the direction of Mr. Pentland and other researchers. Steve Mann, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of Toronto who was once Mr. Pentland's student, wrote about his experiences wearing various recording devices in his book Cyborg. "One day," he wrote, "we will all feel naked without our wearable computers."

In the early 2000s, the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency embarked on lifelogging research of its own. However, the project coincided with newspaper reports about the Total Information Awareness project — a huge government database that would have tracked Americans' electronic lives — which was causing angst among privacy advocates and the public. Darpa backed off and recast its grants to concentrate on lifelogging for soldiers on the battlefield.

Around the same time, Microsoft Research took up lifelogging with a project called MyLifeBits, which is devoted to figuring out how to store vast amounts of lifelogged information and how a lifelogger might find important kernels in a pile of chaff. The project's guinea pig is Gordon Bell, a 72-year-old computer engineer and entrepreneur who is recording every conversation he has, snapping pictures of every event he attends, saving every e-mail message he sends or receives, and even tracking himself through GPS, then archiving that information. So far, he has amassed some 160 gigabytes of data, more than the hard-drive space on most people's computers." (http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i23/23a03001.htm)

Present

"Just as a recap, the posts on Jaiku are simply called Jaikus. They are shorter than blog posts. Because their content is usually about what you're doing, how you're feeling, or where you're going right now, their value typically also degrades more quickly over time. On many Web services the interval between new updates from a user is a day or more, but on Jaiku the updates are more frequent. When you browse the profiles of Jaiku members, you'll notice that a Jaiku that was posted an hour ago can already be outdated by several newer ones. The content of Jaikus is also often more personal than on blogs. Although many share their Jaikus publicly, a lot of people prefer to share them privately with their friends." (http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i23/23a03001.htm)

Future

"We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them." (http://www.606tech.com/fullarticle.php?artid=492)