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lifeblog
I have successfully lived for 31 years without yet once owning a mobile phone. But in under a month I'm going to move into an apartment with two other people (a story for another time), and I decided that this marked a good point at which to finally give in and pick one up.
I'm glad I waited, because the Nokia 7610, just announced two weeks ago, might be the one I want. I'm particularly drawn to its Lifeblog software, which "automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save."
This is very appealing to me, because I'm basically obsessed with chronology as a means of organizing various sorts of "life material." I can date this obsession back to reading this idea of Rudy Rucker's in the Mondo 2000 book, back in the early 90s:
"I want to have my life's work on a CD with an access system that can call up any part of it, key on it with a cursor, and then go out into my journals, see what was happening, or get into my essays, see what I was doing then or find other stories that used a particular item and have it all be totally seamless ... I'm trying to merge my life with my fiction and essentially create a word model of my consciousness."
Although my various creative projects each end up stored in separate archives (my drawings, for instance, are kept in sketchbooks whereas my Noah Opponent material ends up burned to CDs), each of these archives is maintained in chronological order. If I ever felt like going to the trouble of digitizing it all I could, with some effort, organize it all into a singular chronological archive. This is (currently) too much trouble, because no single interface that I've seen can adequately display and allow for intuitive navigation of all these different types of files—photos, visual art, writing, notes, sound and multimedia. Lifeblog isn't that interface—but it seems like it's at least groping in that direction.
No word yet on how well Lifeblog "entries" will export to HTML. I'd say that this is a desirable application—see how well it plays out in an environment like Flickr, where you can easily use the "Blog This" feature to grab an image from the stream and plug it into your blog.
I'd go a step further and say that if the Lifeblog people (aka Nokia) are smart (and I suspect that they are) they would do well to think about giving users an easy way to integrate their Lifeblog with their weblog. In theory, this shouldn't be too hard: any number of digital archives can be combined into a single archive as long as each individual item has its own time-stamp. They already have the data that allows them to be arranged in a single structure. Chronology is a very effective organizing conceit because it already enjoys global adoption and has since 1884, or 1918, depending on how you look at it.
(Term paper: discuss the way that an obsession with Rucker's idea influenced the structure of Imaginary Year.) Labels: writing |
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
4:51 PM
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