I spent much of Saturday bumming around with Justin. We ate and walked and took lots of pictures but mostly we talked. And we talked about personal stuff, as friends are wont to do, speaking about dating and careers and money and politics and family and those sorts of things.
But we never did what I do with many other people, which is to say, "That's off the record." or "That's not for blogging." The omission of these disclaimers strikes me as unusual, especially as much of my image of Justin was formed back in the days when he'd swagger around naked on his website. So clearly, I know he's much less prone to filtering his creative output on the web than I am. And it's especially notable since I do ask for discretion from so many other people whom I hang out with.
But of course, he's been doing the personal thing longer than any other human, over ten years now. And I've been blogging about half that long. So it makes me wonder if perhaps some of the fears that people have that all of this technology will cost us our privacy are unfounded. I think that perhaps as more of us become used to having lived our lives online, we'll develop an innate understanding of what's something we're willing to digitally record and share with the world, and what's inappropriate for publishing.
Of course, one of the topics Justin and I talked about was the idea of a personal panopticon, which would grab audio and video recordings of all of the things you experience in a day, and would let you hit a button to insert anchors in the media streams so you could use them as permalinks later. I think we both wanted to own one of these devices when they are eventually released.
I'd like to work on the UI for snagging and sharing all that.
Anil man, check it out:
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/3/7/204618.shtml
The new version of MS Word for the Mac will apparently be a first step in this direction. You'll be able to record audio from a meeting while you take notes; later, you can click on a specific note and hear the audio from that part of the meeting so that you can clarify cryptic or incomplete notes. Pretty cool.
Actually, that MS Word feature comes from OneNote on the PC side. If you haven't seen it yet, it's worth checking out, especially on a TabletPC. Exactly the sort of innovative cool stuff I'd expect to have seen from Apple, and it could use their user experience prowess, but they seem disinterested so far.
Ahh yes! Media experience buffering. In this case, I know I was imagining the media archive from a brief encounter in San Francisco Saturday - a woman is wearing a wedding dress, sitting on a concrete ledge outside of a hotel. There is permanent marker writing on her arms. Two nicely coiffed ladies in their sixties or seventies approach her curiously, as Anil and I did. One of them reads from the young woman's arm slowly, in clear tones: "I am Steve's Alpha Bitch." With a straight face and a smile at the end. "How interesting!" they exclaimed.
What a moment in sound and pictures!
Fortunately, we've at least got a photo of the event.
Hah - perfect! A bride, myself and the older ladies. Photographed with good timing by a handy camera. Congratulations Anil, on being media aware. I wonder - what will remain of all our adventures? Decades after we are dead, who will care to sift through all of these megabytes? Will web hosting agreements be pounded out in wills and testaments? "I bequeath my estate to be put into a foundation to pay for the permanent ongoing hosting of anildash.com." Soon bloggers will start to die. They probably already have been. Just in time for academics to start examining them as 21st century Samuel Pepyss!
"But of course, he's been doing the personal thing longer than any other human, over ten years now."
Somehow I think there are people who have him beat, just not on the web. Spaulding Gray, for instance.
personal thing = personal web publishing, in this context