MyLifeBits

MyLifeBits is a Microsoft Research project to create a "lifetime store of everything.” I learned about “MyLifeBits” from an interesting New Yorker article about Gordon Bell. This article says Bell been described as “the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers.”

An excerpt from the New Yorker article:

The project is called MyLifeBits, and its purpose is to find uses for the material that Bell is storing and that he and Gemmell believe everyone will eventually store on their computers. (By 2010, a typical life, they feel sure, will fit on a cell phone.) Bell’s archive has two sections: a historical part and a contemporary part. Aware that they could add to the archive anything they wanted to, Bell and Gemmell began wondering what else they could collect. “We started thinking about Gordon’s whole life,” Gemmell says. “We started going into ‘What if I stored everything, what would it mean, what are the implications? We don’t know.’”

From Microsoft:

The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio.

The software research: Jim Gemmell and Roger Lueder have developed the MyLifeBits software, which leverages SQL server to support: hyperlinks, annotations, reports, saved queries, pivoting, clustering, and fast search. MyLifeBits is designed to make annotation easy, including  gang annotation on right click, voice annotation, and web browser integration. It includes tools to record web pages, IM transcripts, radio and television. The MyLifeBits screensaver supports annotation and rating. We are beginning to explore features such as document similarity ranking and faceted classification. We have collaborated with the WWMX team to get a mapped UI, and with the SenseCam team to digest and display SenseCam output.