Late to the party, I got a digital camera last year. Now it is not just the kids, but almost everyone who wants to see the picture as soon as it is taken. Adults to see if they are acceptable, or if the moment has been captured acceptably, kids simply to enjoy it. The spontaneity of photos is very different today.

In many tourist areas it seems that the capturing of the moment is more important than the moment itself.

To me, this means I have to manage my archive less since I can always access the old stuff through the specific feed or through search. It become a personal archive of readings.

That's just one small slice of my archive. But Google is best positioned to make the other piece available too. My calendar? Google Calendar. Email? Analytics? All Google too. So they could pretty easily (+docs, +blog posts, +talk, +toolbar, +desktop search, etc.) become the personal archivist. Their mission, after all, is to organize and make universally available the world's information. My contribution to that information is just one slice.

Great discussion on the fluidity of time on the web, and our bias toward what comes NEXT rather than what came before. There are certainly a growing number of "me feed" systems — blogs, Twitter, Tumblr, Flikr among them — that are already used not only as "here I am now" or "here I'm going next" systems, but as memory systems.

Just as many look back on their own blogs, or even Google search themselves that way, to recall what they said/thought/felt. It's interesting to me how so much of this current "me stream" is based on action rather than reflection: "I'm in a cab," "I'm going to the party tonight," "just had coffee with Bob." I imagine the inevitable evolution will move toward introspection and reflection (at least for some).

Then, we will have both individual maps of our emotional past, as well as aggregated visions of how lots of people feel in a certain time or space, much like the current biomaps already being explored:
http://biomapping.net/

Christopher, Great observation. I've signed up for Tumblr and will now have a look in earnest. Thanks for the head's up. Thanks, Grant

Eric, "I'll find myself re-reading old posts and going "Wait, I wrote that?!" Yes, this is a special challenge. Often I will come upon a me fragment, a note I have scribbled to myself and I can't make head nor tail of it. Supplying, resupplying, the assumptions, this is an anthropological challenge, and again, it's a commercial opportunity for someone. If I found a mysterious photo, note, email, I could consult my "me print" at several layers of detail to reconstruct who I was at that moment and what I was doing. Thanks for the comment. How is California? Best, Grant

I also keep a copy of every email I have sent, going on ten years now (and I wish I could find the floppy or zip disc which has earlier email from my student days). Even without the context of the received email (although that's often preserved in quoted form), it's a fascinating archeological dig of what I was caring about at any point in time. I regularly review my sent emails and say "Wait, should I have heard back from this person?"

It's not surprising that both of these are text-based, as text is my preferred medium. Other people who are more visual achieve the same effect with Flickr streams; as you suggest, most of the value is in the jog to memory – "Oh, that person. Oh, right, we were there."

What's interesting are the artifacts that become reminders of the past. In a post-college shared house, we kept a legal pad for taking messages. Once a visitor stopped by, and noted that it was basically a diary of the house. While obviously not comprehensive, it contained fragments of the household's lives: places to meet, people to call back, and updates of news.

Today, telecommunications has become individualizes and less shared, where we all have our own phone numbers, email adresses, and facebook pages. The idea of having a shared landline number and the need to record message for other people is quaint. So, this phone message document has become a more or less historic one. However, today's current counter point, (although not shared) might be two people Wall-To-Wall in Facebook, where the snippets of conversations can trail back over time.