Online memory, or LifeLogging or e-memory as it’s called, is probably closer than you may think. Here are 22 tools can let you put your life online today.
LifeLogging: 22 Tools for Storing Your Life Online - Fitness Recording Tools
The fitness and health care industries make numerous devices for recording various body characteristics. The Tanita BC-590BT Bluetooth Wireless Body Composition Scale ($250 at the Competitive Edge) tracks weight, body fat, body water, daily caloric intake, bone mass, muscle mass and more and then sends the data to your computer. The Zeo ($349 on Amazon) monitors your brainwaves and charts the patterns and quality of each night's sleep. Bodybugg ($199 at 24hourfitness) is a calorie-counting system (above) on an armband. It estimates energy burned, but users have to record the food consumed.
Tracking my body water or brainwaves has minor interest to me, but what I think any knowledge worker would like is the ability to improve their note taking and paper flow. Livescribe ($170 on Amazon) combines a digital pen and microdot, paper-filled notebook to correlate notes and drawings with any audio going on at that time (left). So take notes in class or draw a diagram, and if you miss something, tap on your notes or drawing and hear what was being said at the time.
Alternatively, if you want to keep track of documents, the Planon Systems Handheld Portable Scanner DocuPen RC-800 ($231 on Amazon) might be your thing. The DocuPen lets you take scanning anywhere. It is a pen-sized scanner that copies legal-sized papers. With just 8MB of memory, the DocuPen won’t hold much, but you can also use a 2GB microSD card for good measure.
In terms of gathering your computing usage habits, there are many good and innovative tools to explore. Infoax makes a Firefox add-on that automatically stores personal browsing history online. Every site you visit get’s logged and indexed here for retrieval. A great idea and one I’ve found very helpful, but be warned it can be buggy. Slife 1.0 is an activity logger that logs your Web activity as well as phone conversations, documents, Web pages and meeting information. If there’s information that’s not passively recorded and you’d like to track, DailyDiary will help. The site will periodically remind you to record your statistics through e-mail updates. Alternatively, consider YourFlowingData,whichmerges LifeLogging with Twitter and lets you tweet your life one moment at a time.
LifeloggingPosted on: 11-17-09 | By: Jack MasonWho wouldn't want a better memory, Webster? I think what you may be missing is that huge portions of your life are already online, or digitized, in the form of transactions, records, interactions and all the digital breadcumbs we leave in the Internet age.
And people are lifelogging already without even fully realizing it...consider how those with a Google Mail account probably don't both to delete stuff, but can look back and scan their archives if they needed to find a contact, link, etc.
Today, much of your digital lifelog is being aggregated by others: credit bureaus, marketers, etc. So the reason I want a seamless, automated lifelogging/digital memory bank is because I want control over all that information. And I want to better recall and learn from my lifelog.
Finally, in terms of privacy and security, of course that is a requirement. I want control over what I choose to share in public. But we already live in age where issues of personal identity are changing and quite fluid.
Some people will share way more than anyone else cares, others are very cautious. But a lifelog is, at its core, about empowering the individual to both aggregate and have greater control over their digital lives.
Why? (apart from specialized uses e.g. Alzheimer's patients)Posted on: 10-29-09 | By: WebsterI am still not convinced of the need or purpose of recording my entire life. These devices may be useful for specialized purposes like helping Alzheimer's Disease patients but I do not see why an average person would need them. Even if I do get convinced of creating a life log, I would definitely not put it online. Seems to me that people want to do things just because they can, without thinking of the consequences.
Evernote rocksPosted on: 10-29-09 | By: Joe MaglittaUse many many times daily. Look for the older (non Web) version.
The fitness and health care industries make numerous devices for recording various body characteristics. The 
Tracking my body water or brainwaves has minor interest to me, but what I think any knowledge worker would like is the ability to improve their note taking and paper flow. 