Nostalgia

This morning the shuffled playlist on my iPod served me up Bjork's "Big Time Sensuality." "Debut" was one of the 12 CDs I brought with me to Hong Kong when I lived there for 6 steamy weeks in the summer of 2000. I kept all the spare CDs in the punchcode safe of my overposh hotel room and would parcel a couple out at a time to feed my discman.

As a result, "Big Time Senuality" is, for me, the smell of the Hong Kong subway at rush hour and the 7-storey astonishment of a Kowloon electronics store after work.

Sadly, I didn't keep a blog, didn't have a digital camera and didn't have an iPod at that time. Aside from some lengthy emails (one a 20-page review of the 2nd Eminem album) there are hardly any digital artifacts of that trip.

But here's an idea that would make the iPod Photo more interesting to me if there were. iTunes keeps track of your listening history, including songs you heard on your iPod. iPhoto knows when you took the pictures that it stores. What if when you're listening to a given song on your iPod, it showed you pictures taken around the time you'd previously heard that song. To me, this would be much more interesting than just showing a random slideshow or the album art.

I would also like it if my iPod stored a copy of my blog's posts (partially available in XML, just like the iTunes history) so that it could toss up a couple posts from the same time period.

Of course, this is only interesting if you've had iTunes, iPhoto or a blog for a couple years. But that will be increasingly true.

Basically, the most valuable data on my laptop are my iTunes music history (from December 2002), my photos (June 2002) and my email archives (August 1996). This is the stuff that has to move with me when I switch computers. And as time goes on, this is the stuff that will be more and more rewarding to review, combine and surface in new ways.