Nick Graydos brings up a good point.
Once we have Personal Life Recorders (PLRs) - we'll need digital lifestyle aggregators (DLAs) to organize all the crap we collect.
Perhaps the biggest barriers to humans utilizing all the technology we offer them - is how to get all this stuff digitzed, uploaded, meta data attached and indexed - before we can utilize it.
But we'll need ways of organizing, keeping track of and backing up all our stuff - especially as we move from home to work and school and bop around the world - as well. This all goes along well with the last post I did on dealing with your digital lifestyle - currently.
There are other things that require DLAs as well.
Activity based computing for one. Is it a coicidence that Don Norman influenced me on that one as well?
Clay Shirky calls it Situated software, but I see a more general era of technology - where the human no longer has to bend over to adapt to the weird rules and eccentricities of the software - to use it.
This assumes that the usability issue is finally understood, that social interfaces are predominant and that DLAs help us pull it all together.
The PLRs and activity based computing will take us to the next level.
Here's Nick's post which inspired this outburst.....
USA Today ran an article on MRAM (magentic ram) and its impact PLRs - personal life recorders.
Personal Life Recorder (PLR) type of device back in his 1992 book
"Turn Signals Are The Facial Expression of Automobiles". He theorized
that these PLR's would start out as a device given to young children,
called the "Teddy".
The "Teddy" would be given to us as children and record all of our
personal life moments, and as we mature, the data could be transferred
to new devices that matched out maturity level." [via Smart Mobs]
The holy grail of devices = Storage Capacity + Battery Life + Device Speed / Responsiveness + Physical Size.
How do you feel about having your life recorded? I'm ready.
Marc Canter has some related ideas that tie into his themes of Digital Lifestyle Aggregation. I really think that Personal Lifestyle Recorders will require Digital Lifestyle Aggregators to sift through all of the data to find the interesting bits.
Imagine a next generation MyYahoo
service – which enabled end-users to keep track of their personal (and
their families) music, photo, video and file collections and provided
them with ‘home publishing’ capabilities to create, store and
distribute their own content. Imagine a social
networking environment which matched and found like-minded people and
enabled them to participate in activities together (both on-line and in
‘real space’.)...
...Now
imagine all of these capabilities and features in one integrated
environment – focused in on a particular constituency, content brand or
set of activities. That’s what we call a digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA.)"