Lifestream – Brian.Carnell.Com

Daileez – The Icon Based Diary

Daileez.com is an icon-based web diary/iPhone app.

So you login, and then select icons for various attributes of the day — weather, mood, sleep, level of mental activity, etc. There are also a series of activity-related icons. Add a short summary of the day, and you’re done.

Not only would I use this, but I would pay for this except for the fact that there’s no RSS feed of your activity. Instead, they encourage you to post your entries to Facebook and Twitter or add a widget to your website. No thanks.

ManicTime

ManicTime is a software package for Windows that bill itself as a time management program. It tracks and logs pretty much everything that you do on your computer, and then aggregates that in a timeline format, application-based format (how many minutes per week do you spend in Firefox vs. Word, for example). As ManicTime’s creators describe it on the website,

Auto tracking of computer usage – Manictime sits in the background and records your activities, so you can just forget it is there and focus on your work. When you are finished you can use collected data to accurately keep track of your time.

Keep track of your work hours – After you have finished working, you can use MT to keep track of your hours. That means no more “punch-clock” like software, where you always forget to start or stop the clock. Just sit back and do your work. After you are finished, you can easily use collected data to accurately keep track of your time.

Again, I’m not so interested in the software for the time management/billing aspects as I am of the incredibly detailed activity stream it creates in its database (see the screenshot below). I’ve got it installed on every computer I use, and it produces a permanent record of everything I’ve done on those machines — how much time I really spent playing World of Warcraft; every website I visited and for how long; the subject line of emails and how long I spent reading them, etc.

This is like crack for those of us who obsess over activity streams and self-tracking. It uses an SQL variant database to store data, so it is relatively easy to get the data out for repurposing elsewhere (I’d import it all into the WordPress lifestream I’ve got going, except a lot of the data is private in the “hell on, I don’t want that on the Internet quite yet.”)

ManicTime comes in both a free version and a commercial version that goes for $67. The free version works fine for what I do; the commercial version makes backups and a few things related to the billing/timesheet aspect of the program easier to manage.

WordPress-Based Activity Streams with FeedWordPress

One of my many obsessions is with activity streams — collecting the little bits of information we leave all over the web and organizing it into something a bit more useful. I used to use Sweetcron for that on this website but a) Sweetcron has largely been abandoned and efforts to fork and update it have largely failed, and b) I really wanted something that would work within a WordPress install, especially with the new multi-site capability built-in to WordPress.

The solution is the FeedWordPress plugin. Essentially, FeedWordPress is just an RSS/Atom aggregator. You give it RSS/Atom feed URLs and then set up a cron job to call the update function. After that, it goes through on a regular basis reading the feeds and adding new entries to WordPress as posts.

You can see the result on my lifestream subsite. I’ve got FeedWordPress checking about 40 different RSS feeds and then adding each new item as a separate post. FeedWordPress makes it trivial to do things like automatically tag posts, so I can easily drill down and look at just my main World of Warcraft character’s stream.

FeedWordPress does pretty much everything I wanted a lifestream app to do.

Please Do Cross the Streams

David Gelernter has an interesting take on the future of the Internet, Time to Start Taking the Internet Seriously, over at Edge.org. Gelernter argues the future of the way we manage information and our own activities will be through mixing and matching streams of information,

14. The structure called a cyberstream or lifestream is better suited to the Internet than a conventional website because it shows information-in-motion, a rushing flow of fresh information instead of a stagnant pool.

15. Every month, more and more information surges through the Cybersphere in lifestreams — some called blogs, “feeds,” “activity streams,” “event streams,” Twitter streams. All these streams are specialized examples of the cyberstructure we called a lifestream in the mid-1990s: a stream made of all sorts of digital documents, arranged by time of creation or arrival, changing in realtime; a stream you can focus and thus turn into a different stream; a stream with a past, present and future. The future flows through the present into the past at the speed of time.

16. Your own information — all your communications, documents, photos, videos — including “cross network” information — phone calls, voice messages, text messages — will be stored in a lifestream in the Cloud.

17. There is no clear way to blend two standard websites together, but it’s obvious how to blend two streams. You simply shuffle them together like two decks of cards, maintaining time-order — putting the earlier document first. Blending is important because we must be able to add and subtract in the Cybersphere. We add streams together by blending them. Because it’s easy to blend any group of streams, it’s easy to integrate stream-structured sites so we can treat the group as a unit, not as many separate points of activity; and integration is important to solving the information overload problem. We subtract streams by searching or focusing. Searching a stream for “snow” means that I subtract every stream-element that doesn’t deal with snow. Subtracting the “not snow” stream from the mainstream yields a “snow” stream. Blending streams and searching them are the addition and subtraction of the new Cybersphere.

While I’m not so certain I want this information in the “cloud” (depending on what you Gelernter means by the “cloud” — I’d be happy to have it all on a hosted machine that I control, but I already have too much information residing on computers of companies who do not necessarily have my own best interests at heart).

Back in September 2008, I installed Sweetcron on this server to accomplish some of this. Sweetcron is basically a tool for taking syndication feeds and combining them together in a single lifestream in much the way Gelernter describes. At the moment, my lifestream app checks 43 separate RSS feeds every 15 minutes and imports any new items it finds. Over the past year and half, it has imported an average of 58 items each day.

And that, of course is, is just the tip of the iceberg as there is a lot of information I can’t import there because it is not easily available in feed form, and information I won’t include due to privacy/security concerns.

Just a couple of thoughts on what a really robust lifestream application is going to need:

1. Lots of storage. If I included all of the information I’ve logged offline, including audio/video/photographs/screenshots, that would easily approach 20TB of data. That could probably be cut down to 5-6 TB using lossy compression, but that’s still a lot of data.

2. A robust database. Moreover there are probably 5 to 6 million data points in that collection rather than the approximately 35,000 points in my online lifestream. In order to be useful, I’d need to be able to do sophisticated searching to quickly include and exclude data by stream, keywords, text, date, etc.

3. Very strong security/privacy considerations. If someone has access to all my email, that’s a problem. If someone has access to all my photographs, that’s also a problem. Once someone has access to all my email, photographs, receipts, documents, call history, SMS/IM messages, calendar records, etc…that’s increases the problem far more than access to one or two additional accounts. After maintaining a lifestream like that for awhile, you begin to think of all the black hat ways it could be used by someone who wishes you ill.