What the rain knows

The San Francisco Chronicle just ran an article about Gordon Bell, Gordon Bell explains why you’d want to make your whole life available in cyberspace by Sam Whiting on Sunday Feb 17th 2008 (beware: pop-up/under advert, so you’d better have pop-up blocking on). It’s a bit of a weird piece. Not an interview because there’s no exchange between Whiting and Bell. After a brief intro, the article seems to consist entirely of a monologue dictated by Bell.

He mentions the SenseCam and MyLifeBits. For anyone reading this post who’s not already acquainted with these projects, here’s a snippet from the MyLifeBits page that provides a good overview (formatting retained as-is from the source):

MyLifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks. There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.

The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including  gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output.

The SenseCam itself is not simply a regular digital camera fitted ith a fisheye lens taking snapshots every thirty seconds. From the SenseCam project site’s Introduction to SenseCam:

SenseCam also contains a number of different electronic sensors. These include light-intensity and light-color sensors, a passive infrared (body heat) detector, a temperature sensor, and a multiple-axis accelerometer. These sensors are monitored by the camera’s microprocessor, and certain changes in sensor readings can be used to automatically trigger a photograph to be taken.

My interest in the SenseCam and MyLifeBits is part and parcel of my interest in lifecasting, Nokia’s Lifeblog software, the scheme to equip UK police officers with helmet cams (‘Smile, you’re on camera!’ Police to get ‘head-cams’) and other, similar efforts.

There were some interesting bits in the SF Chon piece. Here’s one section that I would like to discuss with someone (the emphasis is mine):

Occasionally somebody will stop me and say, ‘Is that a camera and what are you doing with it?’ I say, ‘It takes pictures when it wants to or for whatever reason.’ I can show you a stream of me having a double bypass. I’ve worn it around San Francisco. I’ve got pictures of the walk I take going to the farmers’ market on a Saturday morning.

There are several times when I’ve found it is particularly useful. I go to a trade show and I go to a booth and I want to remember something that’s going on at the booth. You shake hands with somebody and you want to remember who it is. The camera doesn’t pick up audio. I have a separate audio recorder, a little Olympus that dangles right under it.

One could potentially wear it during all your waking hours, but I don’t see the value in it. I wear it for two or three hours for an event and end up with 1,000 or maybe 2,000 pictures. Once you take a sequence, you put them into your computer and you replay that like a two- or three-minute movie. I think it does a nice job of capturing these episodes.

I disagree with Gordon. I can see the value in wearing a device like the SenseCam throughout the day, every day. Some scenarios: Having close-up photos of your assailants after a mugging. Gordon mentions having captured his double bypass surgery with the camera and his operation may have been uneventful, but imagine capturing evidence of a medical mistake/mishap that you could later use in a court proceeding. Even something mundane like having a shot of the cover (and hence the title and author) of a book that you had flipped through at a bookstore and held off on buying, but now decide that you’d like to order after all. A lot of the important events in our lives are unscheduled and seemingly random. Just wearing a device like the SenseCam for “events” strikes me as woefully underusing it.

In addition to all of the sensors that they’ve got already, I can think of some features that I’d love to have in a SenseCam-like device: video recording, >640×480 pixel resolution (at least for stills), a GPS receiver and GPS tagging of photos using EXIF, built-in audio recording, WLAN/WiFi and software to stream photos/video/audio to a server somewhere via an encrypted connection. That last feature would address the problem of theft (as in my mugging example), loss, or damage.

The SenseCam project page says that Additional user data, such as time-stamped GPS traces, may be used in conjunction with the SenseCam data via time-correlation. and Gordon may also be syncing the audio that he records with the Olympus device (the one in the headshot on his homepage looks like a black Olympus WS-300M 256 MB Digital Voice Recorder and Music Player) with the photos somehow.

More from the article. This time, on the future availability of the SenseCam:

I don’t know what the product plans are for the SenseCam, and I couldn’t tell you anyway. The main thing is it’s made me believe that there is money to be made there. It’s much better than sitting there with a movie or still camera and having to focus on those things. I find it an incredibly useful device. People want them. I just wrote to a guy and said basically ‘Tough luck.’ ”

Possible Google Reader bug: trouble subscribing to Google Blogs Search results feeds

I just tried subscribing to Google Blog Search results for the three terms in the title of this post, but there appears to be a bug in Google Reader that’s preventing me from subscribing. After clicking the Subscribe to a blog search feed for mylifebits in Google Reader link at the bottom of the first page of results for a GBS search on on mylifebits , for example, I get the following message in GR:

“feed/http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=mylifebits&as_drrb=q&as_qdr=a&ie=utf-8&output=atom” has no items.

Clicking the Atom and RSS links in the lefthand sidebar on the search results page takes me to an Add to Google page (because of how I’ve got Firefox set up) with a choice between adding the feed to Google homepage or Google Reader. This route ends a little differently than clicking the explicit Subscribe to [X] in GR link, but it’s still not working.

I get subscribed to a feed with the title showing as (title unknown) and “(title unknown)” has no items. in the items pane. The title is not a clickable link to the Google Blog Search results page either. It’s easy to unsubscribe from the non-feed.

Oddly enough, I have been subscribed to a couple of Google Blog Search results feeds for a year or more and they continue to update just fine.

Update on Google Reader subs to GBS results: Just in case the (title unknown) and “(title unknown)” has no items. stuff and the lack of a clickable link in the feed title was something that could sort itself out, I remained subbed to one feed of Google Blog Search results. I just checked Google Reader and the feed came up as having 10 new items. I still need to re-title it, however.

Now, to go back and subscribe to the other two results pages feeds.