Lifeloggers (also known as lifebloggers or lifegloggers) typically wear computers in order to capture their entire lives, or large portions of their lives. In this context, the first person to do lifelogging, i.e., to capture continuous physiological data together with live first-person video from a wearable camera, was Steve Mann whose experiments with wearable computing and streaming video in the early 1980s led to Wearable Wireless Webcam. Starting in 1994, Mann continuously transmitted his everyday life 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and his site grew in popularity to become Cool Site of the Day in 2005. Using a wearable camera and wearable display, he invited others to both see what he was looking at, over the Web, as well as send him live feeds or messages in real time. In 1998 Mann started a community of lifeloggers (also known as lifebloggers or lifegloggers) which has grown to more than 20,000 members.

Throughout the 1990s Mann presented this work to the U.S. Army, with two visits to US Natick Army Research Labs, as well as a formal invited talk.

Jennifer Ringley's JenniCam (1996) was followed by collegeboyslive.tv (1998). That same year, the streaming of live video from the University of Toronto became a social networking phenomenon.

Lisa Batey and HereAndNow.net started streaming 24/7 in 1999, continuing into 2001. "We Live In Public" was a 24/7 Internet conceptual art experiment created by Josh Harris in December 1999. With a format similar to TV's Big Brother, Harris placed tapped telephones, microphones and 32 robotic cameras in the home he shared with his girlfriend, Tanya Corrin. Viewers talked to Harris and Corrin in the site's chatroom. Others on camera included New York artists Alex Arcadia and Alfredo Martinez, as well as =JUDGECAL= and Shannon from pseudo.com fame. Harris recently launched the online live video platform, Operator 11.

DotComGuy arrived in 2000, and the following year, the Seeing-Eye-People Project combined live streaming with social networking to assist the visually challenged. After Joi Ito's Moblog (2002), web publishing from a mobile device, came Gordon Bell's MyLifeBits (2004), an experiment in digital storage of a person's lifetime, including full-text search, text/audio annotations and hyperlinks. Social networking took a quantum leap in 2006 with live webcam feeds on Stickam.

• 2007 Justin Kan arrived wearing a webcam attached to a cap, Kan began streaming continuous live video and audio, beginning at midnight March 19, 2007, and he named this procedure "lifecasting".