via Marc, David Beach on calendars and life caching:
Two of the most important social developments in the past couple of years has been the explosion of blogging and the creation of Flickr. These events have sparked the imaginations of so many and have been the impetus for the Web 2.0 phenomenon. There are open and distributed social apps for nearly everything now. And many more are on the way. People are blogging, moblogging, podcasting, vlogging, link sharing, rating, reviewing, file sharing, asking, answering, and interacting in so many ways. There are now more means to express yourself and to conveniently reach an audience than at any point in our history. Yes it's a lot of noise. But it's your noise.
This poses a problem. If your blog is here and your photos are there and your video is over there and your email is down there, and so on and so forth, how do you keep track of it all? How do you effectively share it? And most important how do you make meaning out of it all over time? Marc Canter has been evangelizing his idea of the Digital Lifestyle Aggregator for years. This is dead on. I called it the Digital Life Manager before I knew about Marc's thing. I don't get out much. But I'm happy to say that there are many similarities.
More on David's posting about calendars. Some highlights:
The calendar plays a big part of the experience as all life media is time-stamped or can be tagged with a creation date and time. Everything you do can be archived. It's up to you. It's not just about aggregating, it's about archiving and making meaning out of the content. … data would appear in the Manager on the date and time that it was created. And that day can be seen for the rest of time. My family could comment on the day and perhaps even sync their Life Managers with mine on the same day, so we could view the event from their perspective. Now what if just by living my life each day new content is created? For life is content no matter who you are. … The calendar, of course, is also important to manage the future. The events of tomorrow are the content of yesterday. … The calendar is just one visualization. There are potentially any number of views that can be mashed up to your taste. But essentially the overarching theme is the temporal nature of the life media. … The next generation of users will actually have the majority of their life events if not entire life digitized in some form or fashion. … What if instead of just tagging photos or sites, you tagged your life?
Like him, I'm waiting for 30 Boxes to open up, and for our half-term break so that I can put Spongecell through its paces.
Update! (5.2.2006): 30 Boxes (beta) now open.
Technorati tags: calendaring, calendars, Digital Lifestyle Aggregator, Digital Lifestyle Manager
