Nathan Howell » lifestreaming

Lifestreaming is only part of what I want

nathan — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 02:15:00 +0000

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.

Why would I lifestream without caching?

nathan — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:11:00 +0000

One lifestreaming article that I actually found surprising was about lifecaching. I agree completely with that article, so why was it surprising? Because I hadn’t considered caching to be optional. Sucking in all that data and saving it in a system that I control is a fundamental requirement. It’s the first step, not an add-on feature.

(Hm. Does lifestream work as a verb?)

Turns out it’s called lifestreaming

nathan — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:54:00 +0000

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about exactly what I want to do with this site. I gradually built a mental image that combined all my public “stuff”. It would suck in feeds of my activity from all over the net, whether I used twitter, or tumblr, or facebook, or del.icio.us, or whatever else happened to be useful. All that stuff would get combined and displayed in interesting, useful ways (to me at least, and hopefully to others too) right here.

Just as I was figuring all this out and getting really interested in the whole thing, this article about lifestreaming came along (with a link to the very interesting Lifestream Blog). So all my great ideas already have a nice name and everything. Figures. In hindsight, I can remember lots of news over the years about lifestreaming and life recording, but the term itself doesn’t ring a bell. The way I had it pictured in my head, though, it was a world of too-much-information. Not something I was interested in.

Now that I’ve come up with it myself, though, it sounds fantastic. At least, when I do it my way… So this site will be my playground for whatever crazy lifestreaming ideas I have or I find on the interwebs. Should be interesting. Lifestreaming actually meshes really nicely with a project I’ve been playing with in my head for years, so there’s lots more of this crap to look forward to.