I never thought I'd see a 7610 in the Globe and Mail (no link because the Globe has a registration wall for all their content) but stranger things have happened. Karen von Hahn's piece is the usual piece that we get about blogging, moblogging and related topics from traditional media. It's fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough.

Why? Well several things are missing.

Why not mention that Lifeblog is only available on the 7610 and why not identify that the phone in the picture is a 7610? More importantly, why not mention that the 7610 is not yet available from any Canadian mobile phone operator so Canadians who want to use it are out of luck (unless they get a 7610 from a Canadian mobile phone importer for the "severely limited handset selection" Canadian market which is how I got mine)?

And it's cool that Christian Lindholm (his public blog of his Lifeblog photos is impressive but at less than one photo a day, it's not really a memory prosthesis is it?) and Russell Beattie (his "life cache" about food is great but updates are few and far between, check out my food photos or VanEats if you want a real food life cache!) were mentioned but why not find some Canadians who are 'caching their lives'. Russell and Christian are very cool but Russ is American and Christian is Finnish which would be fine if there weren't many Canadians doing it just as well.

Don't need Lifeblog to do this; people such as Steve Mann have been doing this for years and I recently started 'caching' my life with Flickr as my 3500 photos (including 500 food photos) there demonstrate!

From Memory Prosthesis - The Globe and Mail (again no link because of their content registration wall, you can find this article by surfing to globeandmail.com and searching for "Memory prosthesis"):

QUOTE

Over lunch, as we took turns reminding each other what we were discussing, I mentioned this new trend I had just read about called "life caching." According to trendwatching.com, an "independent trend agency," the new big thing is using your cellphone camera to document your life in a multimedia diary, so that you can bank your memories and share your memories -- as you live them -- with your nearest and dearest.

I had thought it was a crock until I happened to witness the phenomenon firsthand. During the Angie Stone concert at Diesel's party for the Toronto film festival, two people in the front row spent the entire time taking pictures and sending text messages on their cellphones. And there I was, merely enjoying the moment.

Weird as it sounds, life caching is part of a new memory industry. At the same time that we are living life so fast and so hard, we can't recall what city we were in yesterday, the bestsellers in bookstores are memoirs, the hot herbal supplements in health-food stores are memory aids, and the scrapbooking cult has boomed into a $2.5-billion (U.S.) megabusiness.

Contrary to what one might imagine, it's not just the memory-challenged among us who are jumping on board: According to ABC News, one of the hottest trends with teens is imitating the wildly popular Jackass movie -- "scrapbooking" inane stunts and acts of vandalism with video cameras to share with their friends. And teens everywhere aren't interested in any cellphone that doesn't have a built-in camera.

In a somewhat ironic twist, the newest face of this mania for memorials is new, futurist technology. Christian Lindholm is the director of Nokia's Lifeblog, a $40 software program that makes it easy to upload images and text from your cellphone onto the Internet in a multimedia diary format. "The phone is evolving into a life recorder," Lindholm says. "With Lifeblog, you are able to capture memories all the time, as you go."

Lindholm, who has been described as "the godfather of mobile phone users," keeps a life cache himself. "My Lifeblog allows me to remember the people I've met, what I've done, over time," he says. "In fact, when we first started developing this technology, we referred to it as a 'memory prosthesis.'):

On Lindholm's own memory prosthesis, which can be viewed at http://www.christianlindholm.com, are signs he finds amusing and shoes he really likes, along with musings on why these things are interesting and important. There are also links to other life cachers, such as Russell Beattie, who likes to photograph the weather and document his meals. It all reminds me of the obsessive-compulsive tic of bizarro film director John Waters, who documents each and every person who enters his Baltimore house, from the exterminator to Hollywood starlets, with a Polaroid camera, before carefully filing away the pics.

UNQUOTE

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