I began seriously thinking about this after watching the documentary “We Live in Public” which was about the life of Internet entrepreneur Josh Harris. At one point in the documentary he fitted his house with a bunch of cameras that streamed 24/7 over the interned and communicated with his audience through a chatroom. The project ended in disaster, but while in progress gave him access to a powerful decision engine. Josh Harris garnered an empathetic connection with his audience by giving up his privacy. To see how it would feel I pointed a camera at myself for a few hours. (See: Lifelogging Experiment One: Work Day) Surprise surprise it was highly distracting and flipping the camera simply transfers the discomfort to other people.

Another work of media that provided some good food for thought was “The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business” by Tara Hunt. The proposition of this book was that a person or business can utilise social media to gain social capital through community interaction. What is social capital? Well the basic idea is reciprocity, if you do something good for a person, they naturally feel like they should do something good in return.

The idea of a mashup has been a highly influential eventuality for Internet culture. The basic idea is you combine media from multiple sources to create something entirely new and add value. See: Lifelogging Experiment Three: Road Trip

Given the above, the ideal lifelogging system for me would not require any additional sensors. It would automatically aggregate data from multiple sources (such as Last.fm, Google Search History, Google Latitude, Foursquare, etc) and summarise the data to create additional value. It could distribute some of these summaries to social networks to provide value for others.