Yesterday our family spent some time watching old videos on our YouTube channel. We easily spent almost an hour watching some milestones from the last few years. We re-lived some special family moments, like Christmas last year, crawling and first steps, blowing bubbles, and other moments we’ll never forget. The kids loved seeing themselves on TV (we have a computer hooked to our TV), and it made me thought of the importance of documenting your life.
I think one of the reasons that social networks like Facebook (and newer ones like Google+ and Path) have become so popular is that we want to document our lives. It’s important to be able to look back and see what’s going on. In fact, we’ve always done it. It’s just changed over the years.
We’ve watched old home movies on old projectors. I’ve looked through shoe boxes of old photos. My father in law has even broken out the slide projector in the past to show us old pictures.
These things may not be interesting to others, but they will be invaluable to us in the future. That’s one of the reasons I’ve posted over 7500 pictures to Flickr, why we have a videoblog, and why I’ve become slightly obsessed with Instagram, and it’s why I’m hoping to document each day in 2012 with a summary photo that I’ll probably only post to Flickr (If I post them at all).
What do you do to document your life? Are you going to do anything in 2012 to do it better?
Oh…I found a pretty cool service called “Pummlevision” that makes a quick summary video of your photos. It’s cool. Here’s one the service made last night of my last 2000 Flickr photos. It took about 5 minutes.
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