Tech Talk: Dear Diary: Online

Published in the September 23 2010 issue of The NAIT Nugget. Tech Talk


Dear Diary: Online

LINDA HOANG
Issues Editor

I haven’t had a private diary since I was a little girl.

I remember devotedly pouring my deepest thoughts, good and bad, into these journals – devoted for a short period of time, at least.

For some reason my relationship with these diaries never lasted very long and before I knew it, I had abandoned the hardcover journals completely.

However, I always had an itch to continue writing down my thoughts.

My thoughts throughout the day now go on Twitter. My thoughts around a particular topic can go in a blog post on my website. My thoughts on technology have a spot in this weekly column in the Nugget.

Despite these various outlets, I have never truly been able to write freely, write my most bare and honest opinions, since those childhood diaries.

How can you, really? When things you publicly publish online remain etched in the interweb forever. When your words are being watched by god knows who and when you could offend anyone at anytime.

Enter “OhLife.”

OhLife is an online dairy, which, provided you don’t get hacked, is the best and easiest online personal journal for your private thoughts.

Reman Child and Shawn Gupta, the creators of OhLife, say the online journal, which I’ve been using on a daily basis now for over a week, came from a simple idea.

“We wanted something that made it really easy to get in the habit of writing a journal,” Child and Gupta wrote on the OhLife website.

Once you sign up for OhLife, you receive one e-mail each night asking, quite simply, “How did your day go?”

All users have to do is reply to that e-mail and it automatically makes a private journal post to your OhLife account. The entry can be as long or as short as you want and you can even include a photo.

OhLife’s website interface is also slick. It’s clean. It’s simple. And when you sign into your account you can easily view your latest post as well as all past entries. You even have the option to archive and print your entries if you really did want a hardcopy.

But the daily e-mail reminder is truly the best aspect of OhLife. It’s the key to ensuring that at least this diary relationship stands a better chance at lasting than your previous ones.

And again, it’s private.

So rant all you want about whoever and whatever you want – things you wouldn’t be able to truly do without consequence otherwise – and do it knowing OhLife will keep things nice and private for you.

Maybe it won’t explode in popularity like Facebook and Twitter did, but my guess is that OhLife will make quite an impression on the niche audience it’s targeting, myself included.

Now please excuse me while I go write in my diary.

I’m happy to be able to use that phrase again.

Follow Linda on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lindork.

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