Who's Life Bits?

Wow... I've just been reading about something MS Research have been working on for a while called MyLifeBits. Apparently Gordon Bell has been recording his life since the late 90s, and since 2003 has been wearing something he calls a SenseCam to take pictures automatically.

I've always been an advocate of digital life logging, or lifeblogging as it is now termed... I record a heck of a lot of data using either this blog or the UFBlue wiki and I also digitize all my paperwork, creating a more secure and much smaller filing system... but this is extreme. Bell apparently "has gone on to collect images of every Web page he has ever visited and television show he has watched. He has also recorded phone conversations, images and audio from conference sessions, and with his e-mail and instant messages".

It's something that interests me a great deal. Memory is an uncertainty in life. Remembering how converstaions went, who you met, which decisions you made... the good and the bad... are all important to me. Why take the risk of forgetting? With lifeblogging becoming ever more popular, made possible thanks to pioneers like Bell, we see more companies taking an interest. IBM announced Pensieve today, hailing it as software that "stores images, sounds, and text on everyday mobile devices, then allows the user extract them later on, to help them recall names, faces, conversations and events".

As I said... wow. Interestingly, Bell claims that he stores 1GB per month, which is less than I would have expected with pictures in tow. Also it turns out that Bill Gates wrote about lifeblogging in his 1996 book The Road Ahead. Where he claims that someday people will be able to record and recall everything they've ever heard or seen... this seems to be one of the cornerstones to the MyLifeBits project.