My life stream
Emily Chang jumped into an interesting discussion of one piece of personal knowledge management with My Data Stream (emphasis mine):
After a year and a half of using social applications heavily, I recently had to revisit the plan to aggregate all my activity into one data stream. As the calendar rolled to 2007, I kept wishing I could look at all my social activity from 2006 in context: time, date, type of activity, location, memory, information interest, and so on. What was I bookmarking, blogging about, listening to, going to, and thinking about? I still had the urge to have an information and online activity mash-up that would allow me to discover my own patterns and to share my activity across the web in one chronological stream of data (to start with anyway).
The rest of the post is her adventure in finding / building a data stream to do this.
Chang is focusing on data streams: stuff she is reading or posting online that as a RSS feed attached to it. But the idea of expanding this to include documents I've read / modified / created on my desktop and my other browsing activity would be the direction to go.
The thing that keyed my interest is the link to personal knowledge management. Why? If I am able to see context in which I was operating, I can recreate in my head what was happening and what I was thinking. Sometimes it may just be one thing, but other times it takes more memory triggers to remember the setting in which I found a particular item interesting or why I wrote what I did.
People have been looking into this "digital memories" concept for quite some time. Microsoft have a project on digital memories and IBM have the MyLifeBits project. Communications of the ACM had a series of articles last year (Jan 2006, vol. 49, no. 1), on which I commented.
2 Comment(s)
said:
I played with Ziki a bit -- it really makes sense that if all of these tools we're using create feeds, that we can consolidate them in one place. At different points, I've turned on the automatic journaling in Outlook, but that quickly gathered too much data. My life bits and such are absolutely not attractive to me, too big brother.
Hi Jack,
Gathering a personal content stream is really in vogue, the best site I've seen so far is mugshot:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/02/19/mugshot-meta-content-stream-social-network
Although I do like Emily's data stream as it is incorporated into her blog.
You seem to be taking it further than just streaming from RSS feeds, you are mentioning a stream from browser behaviour, check out Slifeshare:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/02/20/slifeshare-real-time-attention-social-network
Another thing you mention is to also track desktop activity...this ties into something I posted about a while back, kind of like my daily portfolio:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2006/03/22/rssify-your-daily-catch
But this was more about collecting than tracking, the idea was any document, web page, object coudl be deposited in a portfolio as you work your day.
Then at the end of the day press print and every link and files in this portfolio will be printed out in full-text with a table of contents. This portfolio may even have a public webpage, so you can look back to the past and see what you collected, each date could also have an OPML and a feed.
Anyway this idea was more about wanting to print stuff to read on the train ride home in one print click at the end of the day.