Capturing a life
When did you start actually start capturing your life in this way?
I started this in 1998. I had all this material, and was even moving around with boxes of stuff, some of it going back to Digital Equipment days, and I thought, I'm going to start capturing it. Jim humored me, and we ended up with all this material, and we thought, this is starting to get interesting, and this is something that people should naturally do in their life.
Why?
I think it's more natural now because so much of the material originates with a file or it comes to you electronically. I think people are naturally sort of squirrels--whether that's information or thing squirrels. At one point I thought, I want to get rid of everything. I want to melt down the gold medals and that sort of thing. I want my life in a bunch of bits.
Do you really see a market for this kind of application?
The question is, will people do it? I think they will naturally do it, and for certain people, for kids, it may be natural to want to do this. If the tablet (PC) becomes hugely successful, then it's going to all be there. I have no doubt that within 10 or 20 years that will be successful. It squeezes out the paper as the input media.
What exactly do you mean when you say it's all going to be there?
You take all the various information media that you have--for example, your correspondence, all the e-mail or letters that you write and print. All the papers that you wrote or read. One of the capabilities we have in MyLifeBits now is that you turn on the browser or the explorer and capture every page you looked at. The system now captures everything that you see that comes to you electronically.
You've got all that. I'm capturing phone conversations, so those are available. I've got a Sony voice recorder, and that will be another capture device, so in principle every conversation you have could be captured there. The TiVo capability could get you all the TV you'd ever watched. Today we can't do that because it's a gig(abyte) an hour. That's kind of practical, but whether or not you want to save all that junk is another question.
We've sort of gone off on this direction of looking at massive capture, looking at anything that can be--I like the word "cyberized," but a lot of people hate that. Digitised, encoded--we can encode all this material at this point in time, and our research is looking at a how you would do it and how you would rationalise why you would do it.
Why would you? What's the point of saving all this information?
I break this problem in a two-by-two quadrant. There's personal information, then professional information, and there's today. Anything yesterday is almost an archival problem, and anything I'm using today and recently is working. In each of those quadrants, there's content you would do for different reasons. In my professional life, there might appear a book, my paper or some other paper that's of value to me going forward. The working part is really dealing with what I'm doing today.
It's, in a funny way, no different than walking into a knowledge worker's office of 10, 20, 50 years ago. You walk in and look at how old people are by going into a faculty member's office or a researcher's office and they have a load of books and file cabinets and paper stacked everywhere.
Maybe they can find something, but I tend to think of the world as really fairly clean. I want to scarf up that material. There's really so much material, but the only thing I really trust is my computer. We really need machines to help us search, organize and hold and to be able to retrieve the vast amount of information that's come into our visual cortex.
7%
1%
