Jill points to and article on Personal Life Annotation Devices. Weblogs, as a technology, are nothing but a system of rapid publication to the web. But the engender a new way of thinking about communication. The function of a blog is not that different from the functions that have endlessly been put forward for mass and personal communication. They just seem to perform these functions in a much more integrated way.
The article is less about text-blogging than it is about photoblogging. Of course, a million (or a hundred million) photoblogs with shots throughout the day is interesting, but more interesting is when all of these are classified, integrated, and accessible. It allows for a new kind of surveillance (and not necessarily in the nasty “big brother” sort of way) of everyday life.
How lightweight (both literally and in the user-interface sense) must a device be to make it a useful real-life annotation system. It must provide both a nearly transparent way of recording a life, but equally important, it must figure out how to skip over the boring stuff.
That last bit is kind of interesting. I mentally already skip over the boring stuff in my memory –as well as some of the not-so-boring stuff, unfortunately. Forgetting is an amazing valuable cognitive function. Creating PLADs (woo-hoo, new acronym) that augment our memory is a huge project, but it only forestalls an even bigger one: devices that augment forgetting.
Everyone PLAD
Jill points to and article on Personal Life Annotation Devices. Weblogs, as a technology, are nothing but a system of rapid publication to the web. But the engender a new way of thinking about communication. The function of a blog is not that different from the functions that have endlessly been put forward for mass and personal communication. They just seem to perform these functions in a much more integrated way.
The article is less about text-blogging than it is about photoblogging. Of course, a million (or a hundred million) photoblogs with shots throughout the day is interesting, but more interesting is when all of these are classified, integrated, and accessible. It allows for a new kind of surveillance (and not necessarily in the nasty “big brother” sort of way) of everyday life.
How lightweight (both literally and in the user-interface sense) must a device be to make it a useful real-life annotation system. It must provide both a nearly transparent way of recording a life, but equally important, it must figure out how to skip over the boring stuff.
That last bit is kind of interesting. I mentally already skip over the boring stuff in my memory –as well as some of the not-so-boring stuff, unfortunately. Forgetting is an amazing valuable cognitive function. Creating PLADs (woo-hoo, new acronym) that augment our memory is a huge project, but it only forestalls an even bigger one: devices that augment forgetting.
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