What if the Web was watching your every move? I don't mean the optional status updates of Twitter and FaceBook, or the location tracking of a GPS device. Kottke, by way of Snarkmarket, notes how Wired magazine has started an interesting experiment where they are posting photos, videos, and text to show how an article is created at the magazine. They will apparently post a draft of the article and fact-checking notes as they prepare the feature story (about writer Charlie Kaufman's transition into the director's chair) for a November issue. It's an example of how the Web can "twitterize" our lives in ways that a single medium, such as print or video, could never achieve. Granted, the exercise is a bit narcissistic, but then so is every post on FaceBook to some extent. We assume that everyone else around us cares what we are doing.

At best, lifetracking is a brilliant chronicle of our lives, a way to see how we have matured, connected, and - in some ways - evolved. I'd love to see an MIT experiment that takes the cumulative progress on FaceBook over a set period and somehow shows how our social connections are improving. And, ten years from now, it will be interesting to see how a life plays out in real-time on sites like Twitter and FaceBook, if we don't keep jumping onto a new social bandwagon. Imagine the rich history of verbal communication, photos, videos, and other data about every one of those 90 million users, which will likely be three times that number or more by 2018.

(At worst, lifetracking is invasive, and borders on solipism.)

The Wired experiment is interesting to "new media" journalists like me who have also done a lot of print work. It's a peek inside the process, but also a day-to-day synopsis of how people do their jobs. Watch out for the lifetracking blog on how a new building is constructed, or how beer is made!

Okay, so there's a question about how interesting this really is. In one Wired video, you can hear the editors discuss the story arcs and refer (in a way that is so self-referential it's a little scary) to the idea of blogging the story. Commenters at Storyboard have wondered whether the exposed lifetracking will change the editorial process. I don't think it will, anymore than FaceBook posts change how people live.

And what if everything we did was somehow chronicled in this way? A private Big Brother to the world - not just a camera strapped to your head, but a personal Web chronicle. We could extract a rich bevy of information from that kind of lifetracking: where did we intersect with people before we actually met them, what led to the downturn of someone who started a life of crime, how did a high school student change over a set time period and wind up at Harvard or a local community college? What is the difference between the lifetracking of a famous person versus someone who ended up working at the local distillery plant? How does the life of a child follow a similar arc to that of his or her parents? And, if we can collect this data, is there a way to alter our lives mid-tracking?

It reminds me of what 23andMe and others are doing with DNA testing, which collects millions of data points and determines your hair color and disposition to certain diseases. And yet, DNA is a snapshot of who you are scientifically. Lifetracking would be even richer: it would show how you have changed, how you became you, what is ahead for you in life.

And, how would this lifetracking help us in 100 years from now? Or 200? Okay, maybe I am starting to agree with Mark Zuckerberg's comment about media changing every 100 years. Valleywag called them inane, but maybe they were so prescient we can't even grasp them yet. Heh, not for another 100 years.