The post on personal timelines corresponded with a talk I did at Strata (and an extended version I opened Interzone with a couple of weeks later.) At the time I didn’t know about DARPA’s Lifelog project, which seems pretty relevant; it just showed up on reddit.
LifeLog was a project of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). According to its bid solicitation pamphlet, it was to be “an ontology-based (sub)system that captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience in and interactions with the world in order to support a broad spectrum of associates/assistants and other system capabilities.”
The objective of the LifeLog concept was “to be able to trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life in terms of events, states, and relationships”, and it has the ability to “take in all of a subject’s experience, from phone numbers dialed and e-mail messages viewed to every breath taken, step made and place gone.”
It was cancelled in 2004. But I suspect that the objections raised a decade ago would have vanished now that we’re all happy with Facebook, and spend an average of 21 minutes a day on Facebook alone logging our lives for the world.
In other news, someone just gave me a Narrative Clip to wear. Takes 2 pictures a minute. Figures out which are interesting. Uploads it all to the cloud. What could possibly go wrong?
Here’s the video of the Strata talk:
I watched your keynote presentation this morning at StartupFest, and I found it inspiring beyond measure. I think you are right on the money.
I happen to have been building a big chunk of the technology required to achieve this for my own startup, and have been wondering how to productize it. You just provided a very exciting answer.
If you are willing to build this, I would too.
I’ll be there all day tomorrow, please ping me @Nhybrid whenever you want, I’ll demo what I have so far.
Cheers!