Tag: mylifebits

memor{y, ies} for life

i’m in some ways, prone to the keep everything disease. while i do not care at all about physical stuff, and like to have my belongings fit nicely into a carry-on, i tend to hang on to digital creations and traces. it may be part of the rebuilding your existence meme. i am left today with the task of merging backups of 3 different machines i used to work on. fortunately, i adopted a fairly strict hierarchy for storage:

  • work
  • private
  • misc
  • study

with appropriate subdirectories. i have this hierarchy for imap, filesystem, bookmarks, my images, and plan to extend it to various log files in the future, like IM logs or browser histories. what would really help me is a diff tool that works across directories and lets me know where to put things. i know about the various synchronization features windows has, but they only work if you set them up beforehand from what i understand. ideally, at some point, my data will all sit somewhere in the cloud, and i can access it from any device without having to worry about synchronization.

The memex is coming

Within 5 years, terabyte hard drives will be common and inexpensive (<$300). Thus, purchasing an additional terabyte of personal storage every year will be feasible for the average computer user. It turns out that filling 1 terabyte is not easy. It is hard to take/view enough pictures, read enough documents, or listen to enough audio in 1 year to fill 1 terabyte. Only video is up to the task of readily filling 1 terabyte in a year. Therefore, we must prepare for the era of profligate users that Vannevar Bush predicted. Users will eventually be able to keep every document they read, every picture they view, all the audio they hear, and a good portion of what they see.

gordon bell is preparing for that day with his MyLifeBits project at MS research, as is the MIT haystack project which drew lots of applause at the W3C conference this year.

We have begun using MyLifeBits, and initial experience is a success. Gordon Bell, our alpha user, has digitized nearly everything possible from his entire life, and will have eliminated all paper (except those legally required) by the time this paper is published.

one question that bloggers get asked a lot; why are you replicating your life online, can be asked of this effort too. the answer, it appears, is rooted in human psychology, and the wish to endure.

Supposing one did keep virtually everything would there be any value to it? Well, there is an existence proof of value. The following exist in abundance: shoe boxes full of photos, photo albums & framed photos, home movies/videos, old bundles of letters, bookshelves and filing cabinets. While many items may be accessed only infrequently (perhaps just a handful of times in a lifetime) they are treasured; given only one thing that could be saved as their house burns down, many people would grab their photo albums or such memorabilia.

Blogging into oblivion

Various forms of apparatus for a new kind of wiki or blog (weblog) are described. In particular, ways of bringing together a collective deconsciousness are presented. The systems works with CyborgLogs (cyborglogs or “glogs”) from a community of portable computer users, or it can also be used with a mixture of portable (handheld or wearable), mobile (automotive, boat, van, or utility vehicle), or base-station (home, office, public space, etc.) systems. The system enables a community to exist without conscious thought or effort on the part of the individual participants. Because of the participants’ ability to constantly experience the world through the apparatus, the apparatus can behave as a true extension of the participants’ mind and body, giving rise to a new kind of collective experience. In other embodiments, the system may operate without the need for participants to bear any kind of technological prosthesis.

wow. this paper argues that moblogging and other technologies will allow for a state of thought, that is neither conscious, unconscious, nor subconscious, but, rather, a shared stream of thought, that evolves into something greater than its constituent parts. one step closer to the hive mind, or to collective consciousness? you decide.

Making emails public

Imagine the field day that Google could have if 1) all email files had access controls removed, and 2) people started surfing each others’ email messages. Unrealistic, right? Well, think again. Why have we grown so accustomed to the social norm that email should be private?

this hits home for me. in 1999), i had similar ideas, and decided to give some of my friends access to my private email archives. i had an interesting discussion about the implications back then:

(me) my private section contains all my mails (or at least all i could save) from 1993 to present. its like a diary, only more frank and complete. so far, only one person besides me has access. i may give you access some day, but not yet.

(her) somehow this scares me. i fear that i may could do something that could destroy that fine construct of our friendship and would tear it down. this went on too fast. give me access to your personnel diary? you did even think about it a few minutes? i AM overwhelmed. in my diary are my deepest thoughts written down. not all off them, because some things are not to be held anywhere – some things will always stay in your mind. but there are things that nobody knows.

in retrospect, the time was not yet ripe for that experiment back then. neither were there tools to discover interesting content (no google), nor was the narrative form of the blog widely known. i believe that people have become more accepting of trading in some of their privacy in exchange for other benefits. it has become acceptable to share with the world, and this process will only continue from its modest roots (“i had cereals for breakfast today” no shit!) towards more meaningful exchanges. i have been archiving my email in IMAP for years (100 MB and growing), and it would be relatively easy to make some IMAP folders browsable and searchable from within my blog. this would be one more facet of the personal CMS, a concept that has been taking shape in my thoughts recently.

A personal CMS gives a unified interface to a users’ thoughts (weblog), his emails (IMAP web mail), his contacts, his schedules (Web PIM) and also his files. The personal CMS supports the discovery of information within the personal data of a user by offering pervasive rss feeds, deep searches and extensive hyperlinking.

Personal CMS

Mitch Kapor (ex Lotus) is building a personal CMS with Andy Hertzfeld (ex Apple). Very interesting architecture, and with these people behind it has a high chance of seeing the light of day.
2004-10-15: Google Desktop Search brings my vision of a personal cms (for lack of a better term at the time) a step closer. As I am writing this, outlook express is synchronizing my 2 IMAP stores to the local disk so that the indexer may pick them up. this gives me at least access to my existing emails while the wait for thunderbird support continues. I’ll start using slogger to save all my Firefox sessions permanently to disk and see how it goes. (Don’t forget to filter out 127.0.0.1 or you’ll have a nice little feedback loop with slogger picking up your desktop search pages, storing them, desktop search indexing them, etc)
Using adblock aggressively should help to keep the signal to noise ratio of those saved pages as high as possible.
I wonder where SharpReader keeps it’s local copy (currently 23841 posts) and if this facility gives me a way to search through posts that have expired.
I will try to get a good-sized gmane nntp feed in through outlook express to see if it gets picked up as well.
I also noticed that my Trillian chat logs are not being picked up even though they are text files. maybe it is just a file locking issue, but it still makes me wonder why AOL chat logs are singled out in the preferences.
Of course, once you have full-text search over most of your digital footprints (which now seems within reach), you begin to wonder what else you could do. correlating information (what sites was i visiting while I had that IRC conversation?), visualizing connections (show me other mentions of the term “projectx” over time), bayesian techniques (show me sites I might find interesting based on my accumulated data). Eventually we will all be using MyLifeBits.
2005-05-17: For those who already freaked out over the minor changes the google toolbar makes on their site (only if you specifically trigger it, a fact that was conveniently swept under the rug), what will they make of this? personal content management? the writable web? another step towards Xanadu?

Platypus is a tool for modifying web pages and then saving those changes so that they’ll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Changes are made by selecting an element on the page and then hitting a key to use one of the commands below. To save your changes so that they’ll be applied the next time you visit the same web page, hit Save (Ctl-S). This will bring up a window containing a GreaseMonkey script. Install this script and you’re done!

2018-08-12: Memory is central to problem solving and creativity.

In this essay we investigate personal memory systems, that is, systems designed to improve the long-term memory of a single person. In the first part of the essay I describe my personal experience using such a system, named Anki … The second part of the essay discusses personal memory systems in general. Many people treat memory ambivalently or even disparagingly as a cognitive skill: for instance, people often talk of “rote memory” as though it’s inferior to more advanced kinds of understanding. I’ll argue against this point of view, and make a case that memory is central to problem solving and creativity.