Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything by C. Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmell Read Free Book Online Page B

could be given names, were something that you could share with your friends, and all the links were two-way. (The familiar hyperlinks on the World Wide Web are only partially realized trails. They are one-way, and are not grouped or named.)
    Bush’s memex was inspirational. The time was ripe to realize his dream—and to extend it far beyond the realm of scientific research into the lives of everyone.

A REAL MEMEX
    We named our research project MyLifeBits, and adopted memex as its minimal requirement. Our goals were twofold:
1. To create software for lifelogging, and the subsequent recall and usage of one’s e-memories. We wanted software to record a diverse array of information about one’s life and activities, from a variety of sources and devices, and to do so as easily, as unobtrusively, and as automatically as possible. The software would have to give people powerful tools for searching, organizing, annotating, and pattern-mining their ultimately huge e-memories.
2. To identify the benefits, drawbacks, technical issues, sticking points, and usability of Total Recall in real life. We wanted to try it out (as much as we could) and see what it was like.
    Since 2001 I have been serving as the primary test subject, but Jim Gemmell is also an avowed user, while Roger and Vicki have tried out numerous aspects of it in real life. A number of universities also have used our software and have experimented with it.
    MyLifeBits is not a commercial product; it is a research project. In fact, MyLifeBits software is not a single application. It is a prototypical suite of applications, and a storage system that blends files with a database. You won’t see Microsoft eventually ship MyLifeBits version 1.0. Instead, you will gradually see more and more of the kinds of things done in MyLifeBits also being done in operating systems and in applications.
    Our aim was to preview and to help lay the groundwork for the Total Recall systems that are coming soon—very soon—and that by 2020 will be as commonplace as Web browsers and cell phones are today. A few early steps in the Total Recall revolution have already hit the market. These include Evernote, reQall, OneNote, Google’s Web history, and support for desktop search in operating systems. But as this book is being written these products remain small discrete solutions within a much larger puzzle.

HOW TO ORGANIZE AN E-MEMORY
    Back in 2001 I could see we still had a lot of basic things to figure out about how to store and organize my data. We had just my sixteen gigabytes of documents and photographs loaded in my imperfect classification hierarchy of folders, and we had no good way to search them, sort them, annotate them, link them together into Bush’s “trails,” or analyze them for patterns and trends.
    The files-and-folders method of organizing data is a fundamental feature of all modern operating systems such as Windows, Mac intosh, and Linux. File-and-folder hierarchies, even when stored digitally, suffer from the same basic limitation as libraries once did: Each book can exist only in one place, filed under one category. But an item might properly belong to several categories, or hundreds. A Brief History of Time is a physics book, but it’s also a book by Stephen Hawking, it was a best-seller, it talked about black holes, and it was published in 1988. You could easily come up with dozens of other attributes that would be perfectly legitimate criteria for tracking down A Brief History of Time and for sorting and grouping it with other books (and for that matter, for sorting and grouping it with other media of any kind: with lecture recordings, with songs, with articles, with pictures, with old news footage).
    The MyLifeBits project ran into the problem like this: Logically, my Eagles folder should have been stored in both my Fun folder and my Animals folder, but in practice I had to make an arbitrary choice. And often, if I wanted to find some half-remembered piece of data