Artilium

Friday, July 03, 2009

Life Blogging

Okay so what do we mean by life blogging?  We see this as keeping a record of your life in the form of a blog, a bit like a diary but which can be published and shared through the Internet. Extending this to an automatic Life Blog we now consider something that automatically records what you do each day and publishes it for you.  Nokia has already used the name Lifeblog to describe an application on their smartphones which keeps an automatic record of your messages and media content in chronological order.

So an Auto Life Blog writes your blog or life’s diary for you. The important aspect is that this is done automatically without you having to write a single word. This has similarities to Microsoft’s My Life Bits project (i) except that no user input is required. One obvious question is why would I want an Auto Life Blog?  At a superficial level it is useful as a record in the same way as you might write a diary – with the added advantage that you need to do nothing, but there is more!  The recording is automatic and the data can be published automatically but what about automatically processing the data. By applying behavioural processing to the data we can potentially find out things about you that help tailor applications to your needs and make you aware of relevant services and connect you to relevant people. You could also query your own data – what time did I go home on Saturday? who was I with on my last birthday? how green am I? When did I last meet Emma in Edinburgh? The questions are endless.

A few years ago a student internship project built an experimental automatic contextual diary system based on our TILS location system data. We then directed the output from the diary into a blog which would be automatically published at about midnight each night. The user simply carries the mobile phone with them and the application does the rest. The system determines the places the user stays and automatically records news, weather and local pictures. Journeys are recorded when the user travels between places. The data is then published on a daily basis as a blog - called Emma’s Blog in the demo system (ii). This experiment illustrated what can be achieved with simple location data alone. We are, of course, considering richer applications based on full behavioural analysis of a wide range of automatically recorded user inputs including location, social networks from call patterns and mobile browser data.

Life Blogging is one “skin” that can be applied to the recorded data – the real value of the technology will be seen through the processing of the data rather than simply presenting it. The Auto Life Blog is simply the start of the journey into more exciting application possibilities.

(i) http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/
(ii) http://emmahay.blogspot.com/