Lifelogging

Came across the article in FastCompany about the novel and innovative method in which Gordon Bell of Microsoft is focusing on to record each and every possible moment in his day-to-day activities. Digitizing each of these information - whether from the SenseCam, mails, written communication, discussions, etc. - and storing this itself a huge task. Add sorting these and searching for relevant information, then the complexity starts to increase. Data warehousing at the personal level!!!

Analysing what this concept could bring if everyone had it is a nice talk to fill in over a cup of tea.

First, for me, this can help me log all the thought process that my mind tends to undergo. Sometimes, very rarely, I get a new idea and ponder over it. Then I forget about this, when I have no relevant storage recording my thoughts. I suppose this will be a welcome tool for a lot of inventors and innovators. - Yes, you have notes and scrap books, but sometimes, you can't record everything your mind everything in words as it thinks - speaking out into a mic or seeing it through a camera, correlating things together make up a lot of sense and brings in a new perspective to understanding things and exploring them more.

Second, this will be helpful for students as it can allow them to recall lectures and discussions. This might give a chance to improve upon their memory, trying to recall what the Professor actually meant and what is needed out of it.

Next for a layman, most of the time, we fumble upon a face and then, our mind goes into the hunting spree of trying to figure out where we actually crossed that face in our past. Trying to have a sample of all the encounters we had, this would give us more choice to recollect the face, and the surrounding in which the person had come in contact with us.

This might seem a total recall, but inspite of Gordon and his colleagues working it out as a prototype, I still have a few thoughts on how this could be improved more - possibly they have something on these lines already ...

1. Face recognition - or some image search not by words, but by the content of the image would be helpful.
2. Tagging the information will be helpful for sorting.
3. Trying to have distributed storage of the information will be great.
4. Ability to log in the information using wireless and also retrieving the info wirelessly would improve the accessibility to a great extent.
These are the small things that come to my mind - wish I can have this technology at the earliest at the consumer level - this will benefit the community at large.

And here is the article from Atlantic Journal mentioned in the FastCompany article.