Creeva’s World 2.0

Life Caching:

Life caching is set­ting up sites that you have com­plete con­trol over to save data from sites that you only have var­ied lev­els of con­trol. Get­ting all of your meta data in one place. Sav­ing each detail of data in it’s place so it’s saved, used, and recy­clable. Life caching is the next stage as the Data Porta­bil­ity Group moves for­ward. This is not the goal of the Data Porta­bil­ity Group — it is just what their goal enable you to do. The work how­ever is bur­dened on to you and I can say there is no easy way to do this and some data leak­age and loss will always slip through cracks, at least in this stage of the game.

Isn’t this what Life Stream­ing Accom­plishes? How is Life Caching different?

Life Stream­ing is the step before life caching. While the con­cepts share alot of over­lap­ping the sim­plest sce­nario is that a life stream is a pic­ture in time that does not save your data. A life stream is ephemeral and actual cur­rent imple­men­ta­tions are very frag­ile. I have a life stream here. RSS feeds expire so data is lost, com­pa­nies go out of busi­ness so the links it points to is gone, or data just gets missed. But to truly get a bet­ter pic­ture of life stream­ing here is what the life stream­ing blog says about it:

What is a Lifestream? In it’s sim­plest form it’s a chrono­log­i­cal aggre­gated view of your life activ­i­ties both online and offline. It is only lim­ited by the con­tent and sources that you use to define it. Mine is avail­able here. Most peo­ple that cre­ate them choose a few sources based on sites that track our activ­i­ties such as Del.icio.us (book­mark­ing), Last.fm (Music we lis­ten to), Flickr (pho­tos we take) etc…Then you can either find soft­ware to host your own, or find sites that pro­vide a plat­form for you.

Many peo­ple have been writ­ing about Lifestreams and the poten­tial value they offer for our­selves and oth­ers. Some of those peo­ple are Jeff Croft, Jeremy Keith, and Emily Chang. It appears to be a con­cept that is gain­ing quite a bit of steam.

I was inspired to cre­ate a blog for the Lifestream con­cept after doing a lit­tle research which I wrote about on my blog. Most of the infor­ma­tion I found was pretty scat­tered and there wasn’t a cen­tral repos­i­tory of resources so I thought I should cre­ate one. I feel that beyond the self expres­sion of allow­ing peo­ple to track their actions in a pas­sive man­ner there will be many more excit­ing tech­nolo­gies that will sur­face from the back­end data aggre­ga­tion that can occur from peo­ple sup­ply­ing this information.

The rub is that 99% of life streams only save the links of the RSS feeds and do not save the actual data. This is inef­fi­cient in design because like I said before data get’s lost for var­i­ous rea­sons. Life caching how­ever has the prime goal of sav­ing that indi­vid­ual data for your use and your manip­u­la­tion. This gives you free­dom to do with what you want. Take your data any­where and every­where, do with it what you will.

How is this dif­fer­ent from the Data Porta­bil­ity Group?

In some aspects, like the con­cepts of life stream­ing, life caching shares a few steps in com­mon with the Data Porta­bil­ity Group. What the Data Porta­bil­ity Group means to give is meth­ods and stan­dards that give you tools to do with your data what you will. How­ever, this doesn’t actu­ally mean you will do any­thing with it or that there will be a stan­dard out of the box con­fig­u­ra­tion for you. The respon­si­bil­ity is on you to act and use these tools that will hope­fully emerge.

The Data Porta­bil­ity Group is key for this going for­ward and allow­ing you to with­draw your data from the sites that were pre­vi­ously walled gar­dens. After the gar­den gates are finally thrown open you have the free­dom to do with the data what you will. Please put this power to good use.

Why Do I care?

You should care because this is about you. It is who you are. It does not specif­i­cally define you in any ways and most peo­ple would under­stand that it’s a com­plete pic­ture of you. There are how­ever aspects of you that you may want to share at a later date. The sto­ries your grand­mother told you will get fuzzier over time. Hope­fully the idea of life caching which is still in it’s infancy will lead to life story archives that the gen­er­a­tions after us can learn from. Our grand­kids will be able ot mine the data and read the sto­ries you want to pass on.

Will those after you care that you lis­tened to Fall­out Boy on June 7th, 2008? Maybe not, but maybe your grand­kids will dis­cover sim­i­lar music tastes with you. It will give them an under­stand­ing of who you are. It will also give them ways to iden­tify with you in a way that you could never iden­tify with the pil­grims that came across on the mayflower.

What do I save?

The ideal answer is every­thing. I would say between the RSS streams I save and the email I col­lect I am almost up to a 90% effi­ciency of col­lect­ing my per­sonal data online.

To give you an example:

• I save every­thing I dig.
• I write places I go and sto­ries about them in 43 places
• I write about things I’ve done at 43 things
• I save sto­ries about peo­ple I’ve met at 43 peo­ple
• I save all the music I lis­ten to that can be tracked with last.fm
• I track all boks I read and movies I watch with with all­con­sum­ing
• I save com­ments I make with cocom­ments
• I save when and what pic­tures I’ve uploaded to Flickr, Pho­to­bucket, and Picasa
• I save col­lec­tions of data that I find mean­ing full with lists of best
• I save the book­marks I make in del.icio.us
• I save the sto­ries I’ve stum­bled upon
• I save the things I’ve shared in google reader
• I save my newsvine articles
• I save my pownces and my tweets
• I save the sto­ries I liked at red­dit
• I save the videos I liked an/or uploaded to youtube

This may seem like a lot of data. It is, but it’s also what we deal with in a nor­mal con­sum­ing inter­net fash­ion. I don’t use the tools that save which appli­ca­tions I’m run­ning and I’m look­ing for some­thing like last.fm for movies so it’s more auto­matic — but that will come in time.

Via e-mail I save my phone calls, my bills, bank­ing his­tory– all this can be stored offline and data­based in the home. Your own per­sonal Google for your­self should be the end goal of life caching.

Doesn’t this make it eas­ier for com­pa­nies to mine data about me?

Yes the google mon­ster is omnipo­tent. Any­thing you share online can be snagged up and archived away by google. Is this a good thing? Maybe or maybe not. There is no rea­son you would need to make most of this data pub­lic. You could set up to store this data in email archives, pri­vate data sites, or per­sonal home encrypted data­bases. Life caching is not about dis­play­ing your life. It’s about hav­ing con­trol over it and sav­ing it for a future date.

As the Data Porta­bil­ity Group expands they hope to imple­ment per­mis­sion con­trols for the data. This will help pre­vent against data min­ing to some extent. The only true answer is that if there are things that you don’t want any­one to know about do not place them any­where that is pub­licly acces­si­ble or in the hands of any com­pany or per­son other then yourself.

How do I store and backup the data?

There are many ways. I use Word­press with a vari­ety of plu­g­ins to main­tain all my data on the site. I also use quite a bit of feed­burner kung-fu and gmail fil­ters. The key thing is that I can extract this data into other for­mats from just those two meth­ods. I could dump it into a per­sonal data­base or wiki. The tools are only at the begin­ning of stages to make this use­ful for you. It is eas­ier to back it up before you lose it then to want it after it is gone.

What Can’t I backup?

In an ideal world there is noth­ing that you can’t backup. We don’t how­ever live in an ideal world. Mostly the lim­i­ta­tions deal with which sites give you some form of access to your data. Some don’t allow you to take friend’s list with you. Other sites don’t allow you to get posts out unless you imple­ment site scrap­ing which could break the terms of ser­vice you agreed to.

The lim­i­ta­tion is in the tools and the agree­ments and the Data Porta­bil­ity Group is help­ing lead the future in devel­op­ments that will allow you greater access to your own data.

How do you share with your friends?

Beyond hav­ing a pub­lic blog which your friends may or may not visit there are mul­ti­ple ways. I have two major RSS feeds com­ing out my web­site. The pub­lic RSS feed gives every­one a fil­tered feed of my posts. This way they don’t get spammed with every song I lis­ten to on last.fm or every sin­gle story I digg when it hap­pens. This RSS feed then goes and noti­fies my twit­ter friends that I’ve posted some­thing new that I find rel­e­vant. It also goes out and feeds the sto­ries to tum­blr, jaiku, and face­book. It is also the feed that my RSS read­ers get.

The sec­ondary feed goes to feed­burner and gives me a post to email option. This allows me to save via an email archive all of my daily posts so they are search­able through gmail for myself. Users could sub­scribe to this feed if they asked me, it’s just the amount of data can some­times be over­whelm­ing and I’ve had a few com­plaints from a cou­ple of twit­ter friends.

From my word­press blog I post to other blog sites. For exam­ple when I fin­ish and pub­lish this post it will also be posted at my msn spaces accounts, my old blog at blogspot, vox, xanga, myspace, live­jour­nal, and dan­delife. So no mat­ter where you have friended me you can get noti­fi­ca­tions that I’ve pub­lished and posted something.

Finally in some of the mes­sage boards I use my sig­na­ture con­tains a java script that rotates my 5 newest sto­ries so peo­ple can read the head­lines and click if they find it interesting.

Do you truly think that this is the future?

Yes, your data is you and part of you is also your data. Hope­fully the sto­ries we wish to pass down can be archived, saved, and cached for all to read and con­sume for gen­er­a­tions to come.

Final Notes:

I hope this expla­na­tion is rel­e­vant for you and that you have inter­est­ing in pre­serv­ing your own data. Each of the links in this arti­cle will help you with dif­fer­ent aspects of your design. If you have fur­ther ques­tions or need some details expanded please leave a com­ment or con­tact me so we can hash out ideas and clar­ify them.

For those heav­ily inter­ested I would rec­om­mend post­ing and devis­ing ways that you can cache your online and offline life. Work with the Data Porta­bil­ity Group on tools to make this work. The most impor­tant thing is to only deal with com­pa­nies that allow you to do with your data what you want and place it where you need it. Thank and sup­port the com­pa­nies that do.