What if you could TiVo your life?

Feedmarker Blog ? Blog Archive ? What if you could TiVo your life?

"When you think about all the cool web applications popping up right now, they all have to do with capturing little pieces of information about your life. Del.icio.us captures web pages you've visited, Flickr captures photos you've taken or seen, blogs capture a very small percentage of the things you think about.

And what strikes me about all these things is that you wouldn't need any of them if you just had a really, really good memory. They're all about extending your ability to locate bits of information that have crossed your path.

People have used technology to help them remember things for a long time. When I was eight, for example, I kept a neatly printed diary where I recorded with palpable astonishment that on April 4, 1990 “I went to Ryans houce but I didn’t get to play very much. My teem lost at soccer 8 to 3. But I had a good time.” Then there’s a picture of me wearing my number 15 jersey and frowning. I have nine fingers and six large spikes of hair.

The beautiful thing about technology is not just that it lets us save vastly larger quantities of information, but that it makes it so easy to share these memory appendixes with other people. An eight-year-old in 1990 couldn’t share his soccer stories with anyone except perhaps his snoopy sister. An eight-year-old today can easily tell 50% of the people on the planet.

. . ."

See "The Curse of Thamus" for all the reasons why we should not have crutches to remember things.