Lifestreaming is only part of what I want

The more I read, the more I see that the reason all the lifestreaming stuff out there mostly escaped me until now is that I’ve arrived at it via a different route. See, I want a whole new way to use computers and work with ideas and thoughts (not that I think big or anything…), and lifestreaming is really just a small side effect of that ridiculously large goal.

I’ve had a vague sort of plan evolving in my head for this thing for years now. I started out focusing on the user interface, working out the capabilities that I wanted. But there’s not much point to a UI without anything in it, so I turned to thinking about the data I’d need to store (um, everything), and how to store it. CouchDb has had my attention for a while as the most likely storage system for this, at least at first. I’m currently reading On Intelligence, so Jeff Hawkins hierarchical temporal memory seems like it could be even better, if it, you know, existed and I really understood its potential capabilities.

Anyway, my point is that I’ve been wanting a system to aggregate and store all my stuff, and that’s really what lifecaching is about. It has other names too; one that I like is lifebits. I’m starting my own project to mess with this (which will be open source once I have something useful), and I’ll write about it plenty, I’m sure. One goal will be to get this site running on top of it soonish.

I know this is all pretty hand-wavy stuff, and I’m smart enough to know that I’m probably not that smart. I’m only just beginning to dig into some of the difficult details of this system, and believe me, I know it’s all going to be way harder to do than I think it is (and I already think it’s hard). Gotta try it anyway. These grand plans of mine have just been idle speculation and a few big, messy mindmaps so far, and it’s time to start taking a few baby steps toward the goal. Any progress is better than none.