What if you could remember everything—every person you’ve met, every conversation you’ve had—and then retrieve that information in an instant? You would never lose a phone number. You’d  be able to share those fleeting memories with anyone and find where you put those damn keys. 

Bizarre as it may sound, online memory, or LifeLogging or e-memory as it’s called, is probably closer than you may think. Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell at Microsoft Research have been working on LifeLogging for some time now and have probably the best explanation of its benefits. But you don’t have to wait for Bell and Gemmell to build a LifeLogging device.  Below is a list of 22 tools that can let you put your life online today.

Earlier this week, British digital camera maker Vicon  introduced the ViconRevenue (right), a wearable, digital camera that captures an image of your surroundings every 30 seconds. The ViconRevenue was originally developed as the SenseCam by Microsoft. The SenseCam’s project aimed at helping Alzheimer's and dementia patients recall the events of their day. What they found was the SenseCam also helped with long-term recall. The product will ship with an accelerometer and a temperature and light sensor to detect when you enter a new environment. It will also include an infrared sensor for detecting body heat and then will take a picture of a person in front of you. The camera will ship in 2010 for $820.

Until then, the spy industry has a host of gadgets that you can adapt for LifeLogging. The Tiny Thumb-Size Spy Color DV Camera Recorder ($88 at Gadget Brando)  is a 2m pixel camera available today. It works with an 8GB microSD card for storage. For the more stylish look, you can take the Pen Video Camera ($139 at Spygadgets.com), a pen (left) that will record 15 hours of video (though battery life is only 3 hours).  

If audio is all you need, you may try the Powerdisk MP3 Voice Recorder Watch ($175 at Spygadgets.com.). This watch (right) looks normal enough but can record up to 9 hours of audio as an MP3.  Of course, logging video, or audio for that matter, without location time and information won't help very much if you’re trying to construct a LifeLog. The AMOD AGL 3080 ($72 on Amazon) and the Sony GPS-CS3KA GPS Digital Imaging Accessory ($102 on Amazon) supply geolocation and time stamps for digital photos and video. Go out and shoot some footage and either will time-stamp it for you precisely as well as add time and location information to your photos. For those of you who are Google fans, Google’s Latitude also lets you log and store your GPS data and display it using the Google Public Location Badge. You can also display Latitude information into GTalk.

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