Lifelogging is one of those things that I’ve heard talked about for years, seen lots of clunky attempts at, and never really been impressed by. It’s a huge bummer, really. Ever since I read Total Recall, by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell, I’ve been fascinated by the idea of being able to offload my memories and experiences onto digital storage and be able to have it actually work and be meaningful. Automatically funneling all my online footprints into a single stream can be done pretty well, and keeping useful records of raw physical data (steps, sleep, food intake, etc) has gotten easier and more interesting. But automatically capturing actual experiences just hasn’t really worked. There are quality issues. There’s a huge storage and organization problem since you’re usually talking about capturing images, video, or audio. Oh yeah, and a lot of the time you end up looking like this guy. Aside from the pure nerd-factor, I think one of the biggest problems is that these kind of systems have to compete with our memories which, for the foreseeable future, are ALWAYS going to be richer, more accessible, and more meaningful than anything captured on an external source.
Despite all that nay-saying, I’m pretty psyched about the new lifelogging camera from Memoto that just went up on KickStarter today. I don’t know if it will actually turn out to do a better job than anything that’s come before it, but it sure is pretty. It takes a gps-stamped picture every 30 seconds while you’re wearing it. I can think of a ton of ways that it ends up being a total mess, but it feels like a step in the right direction. I’m really looking forward to seeing how projects like this and Google Glass end up panning out.
What do you think of capturing every waking moment of your life? Overkill? Creepy? Exhausting? or Awesome?