You're walking down the street and you see something noteworthy, anything from an amusing store front to a natural disaster. You pull out your phone, snap a picture with it, type in a caption on the keypad, and in seconds the moment is uploaded to your personal weblog for the world to see.

That's Nokia's vision for its new Lifeblog software. The first version, to be demonstrated this week at the CeBIT Fair in Hannover, Germany, will be limited to collecting pictures and data in a "multimedia diary" on your home computer, but the plans for the future may be much more elaborate.

Lifeblog is part of the growing trend towards making the interface between data devices and data interfaces as seamless as possible.

Where Apple has expanded on the success of the integration of iTunes and iPod by releasing a suite of music, video and photography tools under the iLife banner, Nokia is attempting to bring that same level of integration to the growing mishmash of data captured by the current round of cell phones: sound, text, photography and even video.

After connecting your phone to a Windows-based PC with the Lifeblog software, photos and messages will not only be downloaded and saved to the computer, but they will be organized and available for searching and editing, according to the Nokia website. Users will even be able to mark certain items as "favorites" to be held in the phone's memory, forming sort of a "greatest hits" scrapbook, a digital version of a wallet stuffed with beloved photos and important notes, only sleeker.

The greatest potential for Lifeblog, however, is in the promise held by the little "b" in "blog." In spite of the name, the first version of the software does not include a blog interface.

"Maybe log would have made more sense," said Keith Nowak, spokesman for Nokia. But he does see Lifeblog as a useful tool for bloggers, helping them to organize their words and pictures. "You can look, day by day, here's what I did, here's what I saw."

Nowak sees actual weblogging as a possible future direction for Lifeblog. "It's a possibility," he says. "The interest is there."

Source: Wired

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