See me, be me. The future of Lifelogging.

This is a post about how Lifelogging will revolutionise the real-time sharing of information.

Related posts:

Seeing through Google Goggles

Blogging, microblogging, lifelogging. Evolution?

Laying the foundations of Lifelogging

Increasingly we use technology to tell people where we are and what we’re going. ‘Back in the day’ this used to be a phone call to a loved one letting them know we arrived safely somewhere, or a call to someone telling about what we’re up to. Mobile, email and SMS then became the easier way of asynchronously performing this action. The important point to make here is that the action of letting someone know what we’re doing and where we are was a one-to-one action.

The advent of microblogging, social networks and more recently geo-checkins facilitated this action but on a slightly different basis, a one-to-many basis. Social networking (as a catch-all) has created a movement of telling many people (our friends, fans and followers) what we’re up to. This asynchronous action currently takes the form of words (tweets and comments) and pictures (uploaded images and in some cases video).

But the game is changing with the advent of Google Goggles and the expected growth of related Lifelogging devices. Here’s the check-list:

• Wearable devices (glasses for now, contact lenses in the future)
• Built-in camera capable of recording still imagery and video
• Microphone for recording sound
• GPS
• Broadcast and receive capabilities (Wifi, cellular)

These are the primary tools to facilitate Lifelogging and in combination will allow us to record and real-time broadcast what we’re doing, seeing, saying and hearing. This is the device and product that will totally revolutionise social networking, ‘status updates’ and everything related to how we choose to share and disseminate personal information.

What this is leading to is the ability to share real-time experiences with our friends, family and colleagues and allow them to see and hear your view (accessed on-screen via browser, smartphone etc).

This means the ability to broadcast home to your family to show them what you’re up to.

Or being able to attend a presentation and have your team back in the office experiencing the remote ‘front-seat’ of the auditorium.

Or allowing your friends to share the excitement of the big game that only you managed to get tickets for. You can bring them virtually into the stadium.

And the list goes on. In essence, anything you think someone would be interested in experiencing, as you’re experiencing it, is enabled by Lifelogging.

But let’s ramp this up a notch and look at the commercial aspects of Lifelogging and here’s where it gets really interesting…

Celebrities have embraced both Twitter and Facebook with top-tier celebs having millions of fans and followers eagerly awaiting their next update.

Bringing Lifelogging into this relationship you have a potent cocktail. Imagine being able to experience the life of your famous sportsman or rockstar as they live it. This is a shift from ‘following’ to ‘being’.

For example, putting yourself in the shoes of Roger Federer as he’s playing in the French Open final. Experiencing him toss the ball for the serve, attack the net with a volley and soak up the applause as he slides a back-hand down the line. Pretty engaging stuff.

Or what about joining Jay Z on stage at Madison Square Garden. Seeing the mic in front of you and experiencing the crowd singing back to you.

These are experiences way way beyond watching a Youtube video or reading a tweet. And sure, it’s not the same as actually being at a venue watching a celebrity as a spectator but at the same time it’s a completely different and totally unique way to experience something.

So, the commercials.

Shared real-time experiences will become virtual goods, allowing fans and followers to purchase access-driven digital assets in the form of broadcasted ‘virtual being’. How much would you pay to get a ticket to the French Open final? $200. Maybe more. How much to be Roger Federer in the final? Well, that’s the big question but let’s factor this down by 10x to $20. I think that’s not an unrealistic figure. Then multiply $20 by the number of Roger Federer fans. That’s a big number. And it’s also an entirely new market just about to be created.

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Blogging, Microblogging, Lifelogging. Evolution?

In the first KZero post on Lifelogging, I indicated that in a way Lifelogging was a natural evolution of how we publish ‘personal information’.

The argument used is the first real mainstream form of persona data capture was (and is) blogging. People sitting down at their computer and writing a blog post (text and image based). From here came microblogging (Twitter). Short, near instant, short message text updates (with links of course). So, as this theory goes, Lifelogging is the next evolution of personal data publishing.

The pivotal aspect that drives the evolution theory is ‘Ease’. Ease of publishing .Blogging takes time. You think of a topic, sit down, write it, format the post and publish it. Microblogging is easier, simply because the message is shorter. So, using this argument, Lifelogging is an evolution using ease as the metric because you don’t think about what you’re publishing or capturing – you just do it (live your life) and it’s recorded.

However, there’s a second axis or consideration to take into account – the level of information captured or recorded. This is shown in the diagram right. As indicated, factoring ease and amount of data capture/creation shows it’s not strictly speaking an evolution.

As shown, ranking these three types of personal data on an ease basis has Lifelogging easiest, then microblogging and blogging. Whereas, on an ‘amount’ of data captured/created basis the order differs, with microblogging having the lowest amount of data, then blogging and then Lifelogging.

And, it’s the amount of data captured by Lifelogging and how we access it which will be a focus on upcoming KZero posts. Recording our lives is the easy part. How we interact and manage our data, well, that’s a whole other story.

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Laying out the foundations of Lifelogging

This is KZero entry number one about Lifelogging – and will definitely not be the last.

 

Over recent weeks I’ve noticed a surge in tweets and media articles about this concept and it’s one that’s been on our radar for a while. Time to start peeling back the layers and examining what Lifelogging is and how it will impact our lives in the future.

 

Lifelogging is essentially using technology to capture, record and store our lives, as we live them. These means the people we meet (what we see), the things we say and listen to (what we hear) and the places we visit (where we go). So far so good. Think of Lifelogging as a digital personal diary, without having to write it.

 

Pulling Lifelogging back to existing technologies and applications, in a straight-forward sense it’s simply the next evolution of ‘personal information’. First we had blogging, then micro-blogging (a la Twitter) and next up Lifelogging. The key difference here though is that ‘information’ captured by Lifelogging may not always neccessarily be published…..I’ll come back to this point in a later post.

 

So how is information captured?

This is the easy part (storage and access is for another time). It’s video cameras (for what we see), microphones (for what we say and hear) and mobile devices (for where we are). And it’s already happening. Here’s a link to a recent Business Week article on Lifelogging. And here’s the video…

 

So as a concept, Lifelogging as shown in the video, is a pretty straightforward idea. But, with most good ideas, it’s the applications and uses that are facilitated by the concept that creates the value.

But why, I hear you ask is Lifelogging being written about on the KZero blog. It’s not related to Virtual Worlds. Well, at least not at first thought. Pulling Augmented Reality into the discussion helps to position Lifelogging. AR is about using mobile devices to ‘add’ digital content into our personal experience. Inversely, Lifelogging is the inverse – it’s about using devices (a combination of mobile and recording) to ‘extract’ information – to record and store it. And that’s why Lifelogging is important in the content of the Immersive Internet.

That’s the initial overview done with. Welcome to Lifelogging. Time to move onto the juice…….