Customer Speak – A Marketing Blog from Bridgz Marketing Group

Blogging on Steroids by Bridgz

So, where do we go from blogging and tweeting? Ask Gordon Bell and he’ll tell you lifelogging, which is essentially digitizing one’s entire life experience and storing it in a massive searchable database that functions as a surrogate brain.

Bell, a 75-year-old computer scientist who worked for Digital Equipment Corporation for many years developing early programmed data processors and is currently working as a researcher for Microsoft, has been lifelogging for the past nine years. In that time he has logged every minutiae of his daily life, scanning and saving documents collected over his 50-year career — more than 60,000 photos, 100,000 websites and 122,000 emails. He lives in a paperless world in which he can instantly call up an inspired note he jotted down 30 years ago.

He’s capturing data every waking moment of the day, with a tape recorder strapped to his arm so he can record every thought, phone call and personal conversation, and he has a digital camera around his neck so he can take pictures of everything he sees and does — one every six seconds. It all goes into his database archive, managed by a software program of his own creation called “MyLifeBits.”

The question is, why?

His stated intent is to develop a near total digital record of his life—every experience, thought and communication—in what is essentially an outsourced memory function that be can accessed and navigated real time. But why? Is all this trivial information of any real interest or value to anyone else, or does old Gordy just have too much time on his hands? Maybe Microsoft doesn’t have enough for him to do.

Then it comes to me. It’s like the ultimate digital scrapbooking project for the aging boomer population, so when memory fails we have our life experiences backed up on a hard drive. All we have to do is remember the password.

Whatever. The only downside I can see, other than spending all day every day obsessively capturing data, would be if we got into some kind of legal trouble and the database was subpoenaed, like Richard Nixon’s Watergate tapes. Criminal minds may not want to be doing a lot of lifelogging.

Ironically enough, what started out as an attempt to create a paperless, virtual memory has ended up a printed book, which Gordon released just last week, entitled Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.

I guess I’m totally out of the loop; I didn’t even know there was an e-memory revolution going on.

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