Ever want to digitize everything in your life? (If you are a blogger, you may already be doing this....) Microsoft has a project in development called "MyLifeBits," which has been around for about 5 years and is headed up by computer engineer Gordon Bell. MyLifeBits would record all papers, faxes, phone calls, photographs, and home movies in a digital form----as well as create a searchable database of all your memories.
"The quest is to essentially build a surrogate memory. Something that's as good as my own memory, that I can use it as a supplement, and will remember everything that I should have remembered, that came to my ears, eyes, whatever," Bell said of his experiment.
The MyLifeBits software will include tools to record Web sites, instant message conversations and television and radio transcripts, according to the project's Web site.
A PhD student at MIT, Sunil Vemuri, had a similar idea: create a BlackBerry-sized device that records your conversations and other happenings and sends it to your computer. The company he has started up is called Q-Tech Inc., and was originally geared towards helping people with memory problems remain functional in their lives.
This would have given the movie Memento a completely different twist.
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If gmail sound like BigBrothers Myliftbits will sound twice BigBrothers for some people, I thinks a lot people will be again this project.
Recording everything sounded like a scary thing when I first heard of it a few years ago (my brother is actually one of the lead developers), but there are certain aspects of it that sound very cool, indeed. From what I can recall (it's been a while...) it's inspired by cheap storage and since storage space is cheap and plentiful, why not use it? The software will store a cache of pretty much everything and use databases and indexes so you can go back through time and find that one webpage you were looking at a month ago that's changed or off-line. That feature would be useful for me. And I think it also stored drafts of documents automatically, with a fast search for finding things based on name or content or date.
For those of us into doing naughty, naughty things, it's the devil. For the rest of us who lead dull lives, I prefer the name MyLifeBytes for it. Yes, it's a bad pun. And yes, it's even worse when a bad pun is accurate in such a depressing way.
Microsoft itself has policies to destroy many emails and notes about work in progress, as soon as possible.
Some lawyers and others have commented on these policies. In USA, legal proceedings involving corporations, and natural persons too, are fueled by 'discovery', a process wherein the various parties demand internal records as evidence. It is illegal to destroy records which exist when proceedings are initiated, but, so far, ok to have ongoing policies which leave few records to exist.
Humans should take a hint from Microsoft's own policies, before committing to policies it suggests for others.
this is a good website.