IM watching is a nice experiment in making a digital record of something you do anyways – which is know when your buddies are on and offline. Since I live in Europe, this kind of information is crucial to me as North America wakes up when I’m done work for the day. This usually prompts me to totally waste the last few hours of my day because I get distracted. I think we keep this type of login/logoff info in the back of our brains anyway so having a record of it would probably be as useful as a list of your mobile phone calls which ends up blending into the ether. This example of Vodafone overcharging its roaming customers up to 650,000 Euros actually went unnoticed by most of them who said “they never look at their mobile phone bills as they are all directly taken from their bank accounts”. Funny how keeping records of things ends up just making more of a mess.

(link via marc)