Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [20]
We also needed to be able to forge links—Bush’s “trails”—between any items or collections of items in my database. For instance, I wanted to be able to link some photographs to an entry in my calendar, to indicate that they were photos of that event. Or, if I record some audio of me talking about a photo, I want to be able to link the audio to the photo, so it is clear that it is a comment about the photo.
So Jim Gray and some other colleagues convinced us to take the plunge, and we created a database to hold all our files and other information. It was great. We could still view my data using my original folder-based organization scheme if we wanted, but that became just one of myriad ways we could view it. We could group items into what we called “collections,” and each item could belong to more than one collection.
We worked hard on annotations and metadata, making them automatic whenever possible, and otherwise trying to make it quick and easy at any moment to add information. For instance, I could select a bunch of items and then type a comment about them at any time. If I didn’t feel like typing, I could click a button and just say the comment. Silence would automatically be stripped out of the beginning and end of the comment so I could be relaxed about hitting the start and stop buttons. I could also add ratings to any item. I could comment and rate Web pages from inside the browser. I could rate and comment on anything that came up on my screensaver.
Here’s an example of what we can do with MyLifeBits, courtesy of a database design with good metadata and complete indexing. Say I’m trying to remember the name of a biotech entrepreneur I read about several years ago. I can’t remember his name or his company or anything else specific enough for a standard search. What I do remember is that I read about him on the Web, the article involved biotech, it was between two and four years ago, I was at the office, and it was during a fairly long phone call with Jim Gemmell—say, ten minutes or longer. Those are pretty vague parameters, but they’re enough for MyLifeBits to winnow the selection down to just a handful of archived Web pages. I quickly find the name I need.
In my old files-and-folder system, I had metadata, such as date of publication, name of person, et cetera, embedded in long file names. But in the database, we could have an actual publication-date field that I could use for sorting and searching.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the manpower to make all the existing programs out there work smoothly with our database, so we ended up having our database keep an eye on a regular file-and-folder system and stay synchronized with it. This gave the folder system more prominence than we would have liked, and made the overall system more fragile, but that was the reality of creating prototypes with limited resources. Thankfully, it was just a nuisance, not a serious roadblock. Our software still looked pretty much the same, and we still could learn from real-life experience with this kind of storage, no matter what was under the hood. We were up and running.
CAPTURE EVERYTHING, DISCARD NOTHING
While we were thinking through the memory organization problems, I continued capturing and saving more and more of my life bits. The project mantra had become: Capture everything, discard nothing.
We made it a goal to make capture as automatic as possible; otherwise I knew I just wouldn’t capture enough. We enhanced my Web browser to record a copy of every Web page I visited—not just the URL that points to it, but a copy of everything on the page. The