Memory Overload
from the so-now-what? dept
I'm an infamous pack rat. I hate throwing stuff out, whether physical or digital, which has created some cluttered homes and cluttered hard drives. Wired Magazine has an article pointing out that as it becomes cheaper and easier to store things digitally, people are storing too much information. As the joke goes, you could make an infinitely detailed map, but it would be useless, because it would be the same size as the thing you were mapping. In the same way, people can videotape everything their newborn child does, but they'll never have time to watch it. So, what good does this do? As companies like Microsoft and Accenture work on systems that will record everything that happens around you, you begin to wonder what good it does? At least with the Accenture system, it's designed to constantly rewrite itself - unless you give it specific keywords (e.g., "oh that's interesting"). Of course, I think the idea is to make it more valuable for data mining. In other words, you may never want to relive everything you heard last month, but when you suddenly need to remember the name of your new neighbor, it would help to be able to recall that one fact. If your brain isn't sufficient, wouldn't it be nice to have a digital backup that could be searched?
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I'm the opposite. I'm constantly looking for stuff that I deleted weeks ago. With email, my default is to delete. The only way an email gets saved is if I move it from the inbox to a specific folder. About once per month, I dump the trash folder.
I've been sort of using my blog as a back up brain. I find myself blogging things just so I'll remember it later. I've been toying with the idea of putting up another blog in a password protected directory and using that as sort of a online version of my palm pilot notes, where I can save random stuff that isn't really public yet I need to make a note before it thought drifts off into oblivion. If I could sync my Palm Pilot with the Web that would work great, but I've never found an solution that actually works well for that.
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