Days Of Our Blog

This is a bit of a side issue but something to consider. A few years back I got a decent digital camera and that completely changed the way I remember my ´life´. I would take happy snaps of stupid stuff, come back months/years later and remember the time and place that would have otherwise have been forgotten.

One of the joys I loved of digital was the instant nature of it. Before with SLR cameras, my biggest problem was getting film developed, costly, so never took pictures and so forth. As a result, my years in college/dorms/university is a bit of a blind spot photographically (something I kick myself about now).

I´ve always enjoyed going back over diaries written years ago and you see things that would otherwise have been missed. Problem is always the time taken to write them. So used the video record function on my digital camera and just spoke for a couple of minutes that would capture as much information as typing for half an hour (along with any emotion and physically state).

Even this blog has helped out for some of those days that I haven´t quite gotten around to my little journal I carry around with me on this trip (somehow when I´m in a drawing mood, nothing else seems to get done).

Naturally as we look back on history, we know people from letters, art, conference papers, tv interviews etc which is kinda limited. Thus in recent years I´ve been beginning to think about how historical researchers in 100 years time will piece together peoples lives when there will just be so much content ... too much.

Much like the internet. Before the internet, getting content was difficult and ione developed a particular type of researching skill. These days, content is plentiful and knowing how to access the ´quality´ content is the research skill (google has helped in a lot of ways). Kirsty I´m turning in your direction as I´m sure you´d have some interesting insights in this area.

Big problem is how to ´catalog´ with storage limits almost becoming irrelevant today. Thus I happened to come across this article in the paper today, and points to an interesting future with the content of our lives:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/03/03/1109700590953.html?oneclick=true