Recording Your Entire Life

Scientific American has an article on Gordon Bell's 9-year-long experiment of recording great swaths of his life on digital media. The idea harks back to an article by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s, which arguably presaged hypertext and the Web as well. Bell, the father of the VAX computer and now with Microsoft Research, first published a paper on his experiment in CACM in 2001. The goal is to record "all of Bell's communications with other people and machines, as well as the images he sees, the sounds he hears and the Web sites he visits." Storage requirements are estimated at a modest 18 GB a year, 1.1 TB over a 60-year span. Not a lot if the article's projection comes to pass — that we will all be walking around with 1 TB of storage in our portable devices by 2015. The article is co-authored by Jim Gemmell, who wrote the software for the MyLifeBits project.

Comments

nice

[dedazo]

Or you could just use free software and encourage others to do the same before big brother can outlaw it along with the rest of your freedoms. Who on Earth is going to trust M$ with a life recorder?

twitter, do you sometimes feel you're taking this heroic struggle against "M$" a little too far? Inserting yourself into threads with pointless non-sequiturs like these?