Your Life in Bits

How much of your life is digitized? How many digital photos do you have? Are your personal documents stored as PDFs somewhere? How about videos?

Trendwatching has put a name to the long-noted trend toward recording aspects of one's life digitally -- life caching. As personal communications devices converge and storage space becomes more compact and cheap (falling to a penny per megabyte), recording, storing and sharing one's life experiences will become more practical... and more common.

To understand the potency of today's storage media, consider this quote from Microsoft Research's Rick Rashid: "You can store every conversation you've ever had in a terabyte. You can store every picture you've ever taken in another terabyte. And the Net Present Value of a terabyte is $200."

Take, for example, Iomega's Family File Server, the NAS 100d, a backup device for family digital media that stores 160 GB of data.

Or, USB personal servers like those from Realm Systems, which essentially serve as a pocket-sized PC that could be hooked up to any monitor and keyboard...

Is the current crop of camera and video phones too limiting for you? Then check out the latest video phone from Pantech:

Trendwatching also takes note of blogging, digital scrapbooking and even biography services. These and other technologies address the "how" of life caching, but not the "why." Will other people find your life to be as interesting as you find it? Or will all this be little more than an exercise in high-tech ego-tripping? Plus, how much of your life do you really want to record and save for posterity? Already we've seen how people can be embarassed by their personal digital media being compromised.

The technology of life caching is falling into place, but the art and craft of it will require time to evolve.

Source: Trendwatching

Belated April Foolishness

Did you hear that President Bush cancelled to space shuttle program? Or that Yahoo! and Google have merged to form YaGoohoo!gle? Or that the UN is shutting down the Internet? Or the story about the guy who is selling his baby to pay for tech gadgets?

If so, you might want to check the dateline on those posts. If it's April 1, there's a good chance they might be jokes. By the way, if you haven't figured it out already, all of the above items were pranks.

The Urgo blog is cataloging some of the more imaginative online April Fool's Day joke posts. In the same spirit, the UK Guardian has a quiz to see if you can spot the April Fool's pranks in nine news stories (I aced it).

So a belated happy April Fool's Day, all! Oh, one other thing... We have an exclusive picture from NASA of water on Mars:

A Flock of Robots

Blogs of War, a blog that tracks military technology, reports that a defense contractor has successfully tested parasail robots that follow "flocking and swarming" algorithms to fly together in a tight formation toward a target without human intervention.

The behavior mimics animals such a birds, which can stay together even while making difficult flight maneuvers without colliding or scattering. Atair Aerospace has been conducting tests of this technology (called Onyx) on unmanned aeriel vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to airdrop weapons or supplies onto precise targets. Using Onyx, 50 or more UAVs can be dropped at once onto one or more targets.

Source: Smart Mobs

In Travel, Disrupting the Disrupters

No sooner had online travel sites revolutionized how we find and book travel deals than they themselves could be disrupted. Yahoo! and AOL are tweaking their search engines to scour travel provider sites for the lowest air and hotel fares.

These meta-travel initiatives -- AOL's Pinpoint Travel and Yahoo's FareChase -- search the web for the lowest air fares, hotel rates and car rental deals. Instead of booking through either site, the user is given a direct link to the airline, hotel or car rental agency to make the transaction. In addition to helping users locate the lowest prices, these services also allow them to sidestep booking fees.

The concept is not new, but the two Net giants give it more weight than could the startup companies who originally developed the technology. "Yahoo and AOL together are going to contribute to total upheaval in the travel world," says Henry Harteveldt of Forrester Research.

One downside is that some providers -- most notably discount airline Southwest -- have opted out of the systems, thereby denying users a truly comprehensive search. If these sites really do catch on, though, services would have everything to lose by opting out; it would be like not allowing your website to be listed on a popular search engine... which is essentially what these sites are.

Sources: eWeek, Emerging Technologies

Americans Loved John Paul II, But are Open to Change

This weekend's big story -- and the big story for the next few weeks, barring a global crisis of some kind -- was the death of Pope John Paul II, his pending funeral, and the subsequent election of a new pontiff. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll has found that while both US Catholics and non-Catholics hold John Paul in the highest esteem, many would like to see the next pope change things. And, as with so many things Americans feel strongly about these days, the respondents are divided over what kind of change they'd like to see.

The respondents strongly agreed (90%) that John Paul will go down as either a great or one of the greatest popes ever; 71% of the Catholics surveyed said that he would likely be made into a saint.

However, although nearly 60% said that they would like to see the next pope take theological stands similar to those of John Paul, a third would like to see a more liberal pope. Only 4% said they'd like to see the next pope be more conservative.

Majorities of those surveyed said the next pope should take more liberal positions on birth control, stem cell research and permitting priests to marry. Respondents were almost evenly split on the issues of divorce and allowing women to be priests. The one issue on which the respondents clearly supported John Paul's position was abortion.

The respondents overwhelmingly said that they would support a pope who came from Africa, Asia or Latin America -- regions in which the Catholic Church is growing rapidly, and regions that will likely influence the Church heavily over the coming years.

RELATED: The Pope Blog, MSNBC and New Zealand-based Catholic Communications are blogging the passing of John Paul II and upcoming events at the Vatican. Also...

• BuzzMachine has a collection of links concerning the pope, papal succession, Catholic traditions and popular misconceptions.
• Textually.org reports on how the Vatican used e-mail and SMS messaging to keep the press updated in the days leading to the Pope's death.
  
• The UK Guardian has retrieved a 2002 message from Pope John Paul II urging Catholics to use Internet technology to spread the Gospel.
• Some of the more popular web portals in China are censoring and blocking comments on discussion boards about the Pope. Although they claim they are acting independently and not on orders of the government, the sites' explanations sound suspicious: "Religious issues are special. We are afraid of problems arising... We're afraid people who don't understand religion will make unreasonable remarks."
• Visit the official Vatican website at http://www.vatican.va

UPDATE: Amid the seemingly endless media celebrations of the life of Pope John Paul II comes this contrarian piece from the National Review. Also, Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine suggests that the attention that TV news has given to the story has approached overkill, noting that the global media have devoted 10 times as much print space and airtime to the death of John Paul than to the re-election of President Bush.

Source: CNN.com

Blasts from the Past

I'll be traveling the remainder of this week, so I'll present this week's Friday diversion a few days early...

Anyone over the age of, perhaps, 30 remembers some aspect of the Cold War, whether it be the Cuban Missile Crisis, "airraid drills" in school (I never understood the logic of how hiding under a desk could protect you from a nuclear bomb) or Ronald Reagan ordering Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall. Now, a website called CONELRAD has compiled a history of some of the more over-the-top Cold War moments and mementos. Most anecdotes are from the 1950s and '60s, when nuclear paranoia was at a fever pitch.

Much of the site's "atomic culture" content -- such as dire scenarios of "Soviet America", condemnations of "Marxist minstrels," or a supposed public service announcement by actor Arthur Godfrey to be played if the nation were to come under nuclear attack -- looks bizarre when seen through modern eyes. But CONELRAD is important on several levels. If you're too young to remember much of the Cold War, you'll likely appreciate the site's retro-ironic take on the era. If you do remember, it'll be a somewhat weird, even ghoulish walk down Memory Lane. Beyond that, there are clear and important parallels between the fears and reactions of that time with ours... and with times to come.

As it happened, the Soviets were either too disorganized to wage real war on the US, or they simply knew better than to try. Fast-forward to today, when terrorists walk the fine lines that separate fearlessness, insanity and stupidity. Just as concerning are less-than-rational governments like that of North Korea, which works furiously to acquire nuclear technology while its people starve. Behind the Cold War peculiarities that it preserves, CONELRAD is useful by showing how deeply nuclear fears permeated our culture... and how similar worries could do so again.

SOMEWHAT RELATED: A more cheerful memory of this era can be found at The Color Television Revolution, a homage to the early days of color TV in the late 1950s and early '60s. Especially interesting is a QuickTime excerpt of the first-ever broacast of a color TV program prerecorded on videotape, shown on NBC on Oct. 17, 1958.

Source: Boing Boing

TAICON 2005 Conference Postponed; Comdex Cancelled

The Arlington Institute's TAICON 2005 conference, "Tools for the Development of Humanity," to have been held April 25-27 in Washington DC, has been postponed indefinitely. The Institute cites "serious logistical problems" as the reason for the postponement, but says it will reschedule later this year. This comes on the heels of yesterday's report that Comdex -- once the gold standard for technology shows -- has been cancelled for a second year in a row.