"LIFE CACHING"
o-quelle des begriffs (term coined ca. september 2004)
prof - 22. Apr, 16:46
life caching
Freitag, 22. April 2005
offloading our memories ...
Offloading Your Memories
By STEVEN JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14OFFLOADING.html
Published: December 14, 2003
an your computer be enlisted to help you remember all the details of your life? In a way, it's already starting to do that. Your e-mail files contain a good portion of your personal communication, and your calendar software has a record of every dentist appointment and staff meeting you've had in the last few years. But while it's easy to track down an address that your colleague e-mailed you six months ago, it's a bit more challenging to reconstruct a joke your friend told you during a phone call sometime in the late 90's. So why not take matters a step further and record everything? Now that most of our information streams are built out of zeros and ones, it's vastly easier to capture all those bits for posterity: every phone call, every passing conversation, every book you read or face you see -- the totality of information that flows through a human life.
In the past year, a handful of separate research projects have surfaced, all sharing the same goal: offloading our memories to machines. Sunil Vemuri, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has spent the last two years wedded to a voice-activated microphone that makes a digital recording of every conversation he has and then transmits it to a computer, where it is cataloged and permanently stored.
Similarly, Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft, has created a unified database -- he calls it MyLifeBits -- that contains the whole package: e-mail, Web pages, the audio from his phone calls, the text of faxes he receives, home movies and so on. All the data in Bell's system are integrated into a single collection that would allow you -- if MyLifeBits becomes commercially available -- to sort through life in a variety of ways. You could review everything chronologically, of course, but you could also easily pull together every phone call, fax, photo and e-mail message involving your Aunt Marge. Or you could build more complicated queries, like looking back over 20 years and determining which friends you communicated with most frequently year by year.
In effect, what Bell and others are creating is TiVo for real life. Whatever flows through your perceptual systems can be rewound and queued up for viewing at a later date. Arguing with the barista over whether you specified soy milk in your latte? Trying to determine who actually came up with that brilliant money-saving idea in the staff meeting six months ago? No problem -- just go to the tape!
A skeptic might object that 99 percent of the information captured by these personal archives is useless, filed away on the digital equivalent of a cobwebbed library stack. And the skeptic would be right: think of all those spam messages and telemarketing calls you would record for future historians to be annoyed at all over again. But such an extreme ratio of noise to signal is a problem only if storing the data has real costs associated with it and if your ability to find what you're looking for decreases as more junk is added to the database.
The cost side of the equation is the easy part. Bell estimates that if you were to capture a relatively healthy daily diet of information -- 100 Web pages, 8 hours of audio, 100 e-mail messages, one-tenth of a book, 10 photos, 5 scanned pages -- it would take you five years to fill up an 80-gigabyte drive that now sells for approximately $100. By the time you maxed out that drive, you would be able to buy a drive with more than 10 times as much capacity for the same price, giving you 60 years of storage, competitively priced at one penny a day.
Of course, if you can't find what you're looking for, the dream of total recall becomes little more than fantasy. Are our current search tools up to the task of scouring 60 years' worth of spoken conversations for every reference to French philosophy or Yankees second basemen? In a word, no. But five years ago we were all complaining that we could never find what we were looking for on the Web. Now we have Google. There's no reason to suspect that a comparable needle-searching revolution won't happen to our own private haystacks.
If these personal archives do become commonplace, the outcome, after decades of dark prophecies about the end of privacy, will be a curious one: you will turn out to be the one recording your every move, not the National Security Agency or Equifax or John Ashcroft -- a surveillance society of one. We have met Big Brother, and he is us.
By STEVEN JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14OFFLOADING.html
Published: December 14, 2003
an your computer be enlisted to help you remember all the details of your life? In a way, it's already starting to do that. Your e-mail files contain a good portion of your personal communication, and your calendar software has a record of every dentist appointment and staff meeting you've had in the last few years. But while it's easy to track down an address that your colleague e-mailed you six months ago, it's a bit more challenging to reconstruct a joke your friend told you during a phone call sometime in the late 90's. So why not take matters a step further and record everything? Now that most of our information streams are built out of zeros and ones, it's vastly easier to capture all those bits for posterity: every phone call, every passing conversation, every book you read or face you see -- the totality of information that flows through a human life.
In the past year, a handful of separate research projects have surfaced, all sharing the same goal: offloading our memories to machines. Sunil Vemuri, a graduate student at the M.I.T. Media Lab, has spent the last two years wedded to a voice-activated microphone that makes a digital recording of every conversation he has and then transmits it to a computer, where it is cataloged and permanently stored.
Similarly, Gordon Bell, a researcher for Microsoft, has created a unified database -- he calls it MyLifeBits -- that contains the whole package: e-mail, Web pages, the audio from his phone calls, the text of faxes he receives, home movies and so on. All the data in Bell's system are integrated into a single collection that would allow you -- if MyLifeBits becomes commercially available -- to sort through life in a variety of ways. You could review everything chronologically, of course, but you could also easily pull together every phone call, fax, photo and e-mail message involving your Aunt Marge. Or you could build more complicated queries, like looking back over 20 years and determining which friends you communicated with most frequently year by year.
In effect, what Bell and others are creating is TiVo for real life. Whatever flows through your perceptual systems can be rewound and queued up for viewing at a later date. Arguing with the barista over whether you specified soy milk in your latte? Trying to determine who actually came up with that brilliant money-saving idea in the staff meeting six months ago? No problem -- just go to the tape!
A skeptic might object that 99 percent of the information captured by these personal archives is useless, filed away on the digital equivalent of a cobwebbed library stack. And the skeptic would be right: think of all those spam messages and telemarketing calls you would record for future historians to be annoyed at all over again. But such an extreme ratio of noise to signal is a problem only if storing the data has real costs associated with it and if your ability to find what you're looking for decreases as more junk is added to the database.
The cost side of the equation is the easy part. Bell estimates that if you were to capture a relatively healthy daily diet of information -- 100 Web pages, 8 hours of audio, 100 e-mail messages, one-tenth of a book, 10 photos, 5 scanned pages -- it would take you five years to fill up an 80-gigabyte drive that now sells for approximately $100. By the time you maxed out that drive, you would be able to buy a drive with more than 10 times as much capacity for the same price, giving you 60 years of storage, competitively priced at one penny a day.
Of course, if you can't find what you're looking for, the dream of total recall becomes little more than fantasy. Are our current search tools up to the task of scouring 60 years' worth of spoken conversations for every reference to French philosophy or Yankees second basemen? In a word, no. But five years ago we were all complaining that we could never find what we were looking for on the Web. Now we have Google. There's no reason to suspect that a comparable needle-searching revolution won't happen to our own private haystacks.
If these personal archives do become commonplace, the outcome, after decades of dark prophecies about the end of privacy, will be a curious one: you will turn out to be the one recording your every move, not the National Security Agency or Equifax or John Ashcroft -- a surveillance society of one. We have met Big Brother, and he is us.
prof - 22. Apr, 16:31
life caching III ...
,... auch hier der trendwatching artikel. weil die wirtschaft das für das ganz große ding hält.
prof - 22. Apr, 16:24
LifeBlog lindholm interview ...
ein ganzes interview von christian lindholm, dem LifeBlog-macher ...
(Nokia Interface Expert on Phones, Blogs
By Nate Mook, BetaNews; April 20, 2005, 12:35 PM)
Christian Lindholm: I got interested in user interface through my studies in economics. I have been keen to research what the economic value of design is and what 'laws' govern design. Before joining Nokia I spent a year doing postgraduate research in design management at London Business School. My focus was on entry strategies into emerging markets where no dominant design was prevailing. I looked at Apple's Newton and compared it to Psion Series 3a. For some reason the software started to interest me more.
One day I saw an ad in the newspaper, where Nokia was looking for a product manager for user interface. I applied and my background in design management landed me the job, I knew little or nothing about phone UIs. In retrospect I think this was my blessing, no mental baggage. I looked around and learned as much I could from my colleagues and I challenged the status quo. My superiors were very patient and supportive of me.
I had two goals when I joined: improve on the first generation of the softkey UI and create an entry level UI. The result of the work was the UI featured in the Nokia 6110 and the Navi-Key UI. The goal has always been the same: enable ordinary people to accomplish what they want to accomplish. I get great satisfaction when people realize that they can do things with phones.
BetaNews: Numerous phone manufacturers have begun focusing around Windows Mobile with their high-end devices to give customers a more familiar interface and applications. How do you think Series 60 compares with Microsoft's mobile interface work?
Christian Lindholm: It has been very interesting to see the evolution of Windows Mobile from very PC centric to the current form of being very phone centric; Windows Mobile devices are more similar to Nokia phone style experience than to Windows PC style experience. I am an advocate of choice for users and the choice is best when there is tough competition.
BN: With communication between computers and mobile devices becoming increasingly important in daily life, is Nokia at a disadvantage by not having native integration with Windows on an interface and application level?
Lindholm: I do not think it is a problem, the Windows platform is a solid and mature platform and lots of companies have been able to create value on top of it. For example, in Lifeblog we do very sophisticated synchronization of multimedia without integration of Windows.
BN: You have said that one-handed operation is key to reaching a mass market. Can you expand on this? Are the Sony PlayStation Portable and Microsoft Portable Media Centers too big to really catch on in your opinion?
Lindholm: One-hand operation is key for any type of multi-tasking. The mobile phone is evolving to a moving computer, a computer that is used while you physically move and here the only way is to enable one hand use.
If you sit down, the usability reward of taking out a PC with big screen and proper keyboard is big, and hence, I think the mass market gravitates to two devices rather than one. The key problem that has not been solved on the media consoles is text input.
BN: How do you feel about the convergence of consumer electronics with the mobile phone? Every year phones are expected to pack in more functionality including cameras, radios and music players, PIMs and more. Is this a step in the right direction or are phones becoming too "bloated" and hard to use?
Lindholm: I see a constant evolution in the form of the devices, so Louis Sullivan's old axiom "Form follows function" is very true.
BN: Your current work at Nokia has revolved around Lifeblog. Can you tell us a bit about the project and its aim?
Lindholm: The aim of Lifeblog is simplify the collection, organization and sharing of digital memories. When users annotate what the machine created automatically, it becomes your digital diary. As digital cameras in phones become ubiquitous then the behavior of photography changes from event based to a form of memory augmentation.
BN: How does the mobile phone fit into this new "blog" culture?
Lindholm: I think it is a perfect match. PC driven blogs are text driven and, hence, visual media to illustrate them is either someone's copyright or hard to create. The camera phone makes this amazingly easy. This is just an evolution of SMS text messaging where you do not communicate with a person but a place frequented by people.
The more you feed into the blog the richer the experience becomes. If you look at my public timeline on my blog it has a few hundred pictures with annotations and this has been created in the past 14 months. Each picture and text is an interesting little snippet or story, but there is also value in the whole timeline.
If I would have spent the same effort for example to send an MMS to an individual, then there would never accumulate an asset like the one I have now. I think blogging will just evolve into another form of communication; it has a very unique purpose along side e-mail, chat and SMS.
BN: What are your future plans with Lifeblog - where do you see it headed? Do you have plans to ship the software with Nokia phones?
Lindholm: I am not able to discuss future product plans, but we are evolving it and we are getting interesting feedback from users where they would like to take the product.
BN: What are some things you like about current mobile devices and what are some things you want to see changed?
Lindholm: I am still amazed by how cool it is to have a camera in the phone. For example the Nokia 6680, which has a shutter slide, is ergonomically one of the best cameras I ever used. Hold the device and shoot images without needing to switch position is really great.
The key thing where I would like to see much more effort put is on text input. It is hard to do, but of all the enablers it is one of the key ones.
BN: Lastly, aside from your phone, what is your favorite interface that you use on a daily basis?
Lindholm: I have many: My wife and kids, Series 60, Google, Firefox. I am very picky, but I do like to use Lifeblog. I am pleased with how it turned out, and the utility of it surprised me.
(Nokia Interface Expert on Phones, Blogs
By Nate Mook, BetaNews; April 20, 2005, 12:35 PM)
Christian Lindholm: I got interested in user interface through my studies in economics. I have been keen to research what the economic value of design is and what 'laws' govern design. Before joining Nokia I spent a year doing postgraduate research in design management at London Business School. My focus was on entry strategies into emerging markets where no dominant design was prevailing. I looked at Apple's Newton and compared it to Psion Series 3a. For some reason the software started to interest me more.
One day I saw an ad in the newspaper, where Nokia was looking for a product manager for user interface. I applied and my background in design management landed me the job, I knew little or nothing about phone UIs. In retrospect I think this was my blessing, no mental baggage. I looked around and learned as much I could from my colleagues and I challenged the status quo. My superiors were very patient and supportive of me.
I had two goals when I joined: improve on the first generation of the softkey UI and create an entry level UI. The result of the work was the UI featured in the Nokia 6110 and the Navi-Key UI. The goal has always been the same: enable ordinary people to accomplish what they want to accomplish. I get great satisfaction when people realize that they can do things with phones.
BetaNews: Numerous phone manufacturers have begun focusing around Windows Mobile with their high-end devices to give customers a more familiar interface and applications. How do you think Series 60 compares with Microsoft's mobile interface work?
Christian Lindholm: It has been very interesting to see the evolution of Windows Mobile from very PC centric to the current form of being very phone centric; Windows Mobile devices are more similar to Nokia phone style experience than to Windows PC style experience. I am an advocate of choice for users and the choice is best when there is tough competition.
BN: With communication between computers and mobile devices becoming increasingly important in daily life, is Nokia at a disadvantage by not having native integration with Windows on an interface and application level?
Lindholm: I do not think it is a problem, the Windows platform is a solid and mature platform and lots of companies have been able to create value on top of it. For example, in Lifeblog we do very sophisticated synchronization of multimedia without integration of Windows.
BN: You have said that one-handed operation is key to reaching a mass market. Can you expand on this? Are the Sony PlayStation Portable and Microsoft Portable Media Centers too big to really catch on in your opinion?
Lindholm: One-hand operation is key for any type of multi-tasking. The mobile phone is evolving to a moving computer, a computer that is used while you physically move and here the only way is to enable one hand use.
If you sit down, the usability reward of taking out a PC with big screen and proper keyboard is big, and hence, I think the mass market gravitates to two devices rather than one. The key problem that has not been solved on the media consoles is text input.
BN: How do you feel about the convergence of consumer electronics with the mobile phone? Every year phones are expected to pack in more functionality including cameras, radios and music players, PIMs and more. Is this a step in the right direction or are phones becoming too "bloated" and hard to use?
Lindholm: I see a constant evolution in the form of the devices, so Louis Sullivan's old axiom "Form follows function" is very true.
BN: Your current work at Nokia has revolved around Lifeblog. Can you tell us a bit about the project and its aim?
Lindholm: The aim of Lifeblog is simplify the collection, organization and sharing of digital memories. When users annotate what the machine created automatically, it becomes your digital diary. As digital cameras in phones become ubiquitous then the behavior of photography changes from event based to a form of memory augmentation.
BN: How does the mobile phone fit into this new "blog" culture?
Lindholm: I think it is a perfect match. PC driven blogs are text driven and, hence, visual media to illustrate them is either someone's copyright or hard to create. The camera phone makes this amazingly easy. This is just an evolution of SMS text messaging where you do not communicate with a person but a place frequented by people.
The more you feed into the blog the richer the experience becomes. If you look at my public timeline on my blog it has a few hundred pictures with annotations and this has been created in the past 14 months. Each picture and text is an interesting little snippet or story, but there is also value in the whole timeline.
If I would have spent the same effort for example to send an MMS to an individual, then there would never accumulate an asset like the one I have now. I think blogging will just evolve into another form of communication; it has a very unique purpose along side e-mail, chat and SMS.
BN: What are your future plans with Lifeblog - where do you see it headed? Do you have plans to ship the software with Nokia phones?
Lindholm: I am not able to discuss future product plans, but we are evolving it and we are getting interesting feedback from users where they would like to take the product.
BN: What are some things you like about current mobile devices and what are some things you want to see changed?
Lindholm: I am still amazed by how cool it is to have a camera in the phone. For example the Nokia 6680, which has a shutter slide, is ergonomically one of the best cameras I ever used. Hold the device and shoot images without needing to switch position is really great.
The key thing where I would like to see much more effort put is on text input. It is hard to do, but of all the enablers it is one of the key ones.
BN: Lastly, aside from your phone, what is your favorite interface that you use on a daily basis?
Lindholm: I have many: My wife and kids, Series 60, Google, Firefox. I am very picky, but I do like to use Lifeblog. I am pleased with how it turned out, and the utility of it surprised me.
prof - 22. Apr, 16:11
life caching ...
... projekt: unser mini-seminar schreibt den eintrag im englischen wikipedia zu "life caching". mal schauen.
hier ist ein erster guter link, vom eh empfehlenswerten unreasonableman-blog, der auf Nokias LifeBlog bezug nimmt.
hier ist ein erster guter link, vom eh empfehlenswerten unreasonableman-blog, der auf Nokias LifeBlog bezug nimmt.
prof - 22. Apr, 16:08
