Lifeblog

· technology ·

The Guardian Online had a feature on Thursday about some new software from Nokia called Lifeblog. The idea is that you create a kind of daybook of your life by collecting together photographs and SMS text messages from your mobile phone (either ones you take yourself or that you are sent), which are then arranged in date and time order by the software, so that you have some kind of eccentric record of your days. You can also apparently add annotations, which might be useful to explain that bizarre and unidentifiable photo you took after visiting the pub.

It sounds as if the software is PC only (boo), and that it only syncs up when you connect your phone via cable or bluetooth to your PC. I really like the idea, though, and it has made me think about how you might accomplish the same thing via free software with a bit of custom programming (Perl or PHP) thrown in. I can already send my photographs to this blog via Mfop, so it strikes me that I could probably cobble together a private password-protected website that would gather together all my photographs and text messages, and would record the minutiae of my life in some way.

This site fulfils part of that role, but it would be nice to also have a private space where I wouldn't worry whether something might be interesting to anyone else, but that might serve as a kind of record of my existence. If you've seen Shooting the Past, you'll know that photographs — which in themselves aren't all that interesting or significant — can become meaningful if grouped together and set in a chronological context.