A known lifelogger was
Robert Shields, who manually recorded 25 years of his life from 1972 to 1997, at 5-minute intervals. This record resulted in a 37-million word diary, thought to be the longest ever written.
Steve Mann was the first person to capture continuous physiological data along with a live first-person video from a
wearable camera. Starting in 1994, Mann continuously transmitted his life — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Using a wearable camera and wearable display, he invited others to see what he was looking at, as well as to send him live feeds or messages in real-time. In 1998 Mann started a community of lifeloggers (also known as lifebloggers or lifegloggers) which has grown to more than 20,000 members. Throughout the 1990s Mann presented this work to the U.S. Army, with two visits to US Natick Army Research Labs. In 1996, Jennifer Ringley started
JenniCam, broadcasting photographs from a webcam in her college bedroom every fifteen seconds; the site was turned off in 2003. "We Live In Public" was a 24/7 Internet conceptual art experiment created by Josh Harris in December 1999. With a format similar to TV's
Big Brother, Harris placed tapped telephones, microphones and 32 robotic cameras in the home he shared with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. Viewers talked to Harris and Corrin in the site's chatroom. Harris recently launched the online live video platform, Operator 11. In 2001, Kiyoharu Aizawa discussed the problem of how to handle a huge amount of videos continuously captured in one's life and presented an automatic summarization. The lifelog
DotComGuy ran throughout 2000, when Mitch Maddox lived the entire year without leaving his house. After
Joi Ito's discussion of
Moblogging, which involves web publishing from a mobile device, came
Gordon Bell's
MyLifeBits (2004), an experiment in digital storage of a person's lifetime, including full-text search, text/audio annotations, and hyperlinks. In 2003, a project called
LifeLog was started at the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under the supervision of Douglas Gage. This project would combine several technologies to record life activities, in order to create a life diary. Shortly after, the notion of lifelogging was identified as a technology and cultural practice that could be exploited by governments, businesses or militaries through surveillance. The DARPA lifelogging project was cancelled by 2004, but this project helped to popularize the idea, and the usage of the term lifelogging in everyday discourse. It contributed to the growing acceptance of using technology for
augmented memory. In 2003, Kiyoharu Aizawa introduced a context-based video retrieval system that was designed to handle data continuously captured from various sources, including a wearable camera, a microphone, and multiple sensors such as a GPS receiver, an acceleration sensor, a gyro sensor, and a brain-wave analyzer. By extracting contextual information from these inputs, the system can retrieve specific scenes captured by the wearable camera. In 2004, conceptual media artist Alberto Frigo began tracking everything his right hand (his dominant hand) had used, then began adding different tracking and documentation projects. His tracking was done manually rather than using technology. In 2004 Arin Crumley and Susan Buice met online and began a relationship. They decided to forgo verbal communication during the initial courtship and instead spoke to each other via written notes, sketches, video clips, and
Myspace. They went on to create an autobiographical film about their experience, called
Four Eyed Monsters. It was part-documentary, part-narrative, with a few scripted elements added. They went on to produce a two-season podcast about the making of the film to promote it. In 2007
Justin Kan began streaming continuous live video and audio from a webcam attached to a cap, beginning at midnight on March 19, 2007. He created a website,
Justin.tv, for the purpose. He described this procedure as "
lifecasting". In recent years, with the advent of
smartphones and similar devices, lifelogging became much more accessible. For instance, UbiqLog and Experience Explorer employ mobile sensing to perform life logging, while other lifelogging devices, like the Autographer, use a combination of visual sensors and
GPS tracking to simultaneously document one's location and what one can see. Lifelogging was popularized by the mobile app
Foursquare, which had users "check in" as a way of sharing and saving their location; this later evolved into the popular lifelogging app,
Swarm. == Life caching ==