Posted 08/25/09 at 01:44:02 PM by Andy Salisbury

Since 2001 Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell has been compulsively tracking every bit of personal data that he generates in his daily life, in the interest of finding out just how much digital storage it would take to contain it.

Bell, who works at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Research Group and is calling his project MyLifeBits, has stated that “The problem isn't putting it all in. The problem is getting it out. When I started, I couldn't find anything!” Currently Bell has been able to track all the web sites that he’s visited (221,173), photos he’s taken (56,282), emails he’s sent and received (156,041), documents written and read (18,883), phone conversations had (2,000), photos snapped by a SenseCam hanging around his neck (66,000), songs he’s listened to (7,139), and videos taken by him (2,164). In order to collect all this information he users a desktop scanner, a digicam, a heart rate monitor, voice recorder, GPS logger, pedometer, smartphone and an e-reader.

He does suspect that there’s some need to forget though. Being able to wipe clean difficult memories of the past could be some evolutionary trick. “If you think you should forget, you should,” states Bell. “But for God's sake, keep all the papers you've written and the photos you take. Sometime down the road you might be looking for something and you won't even give yourself the chance of finding it.”

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Posted 11/19/08 at 07:47:35 PM by Mark Edward Soper

LIFE Magazine, which published classic photojournalism from Maragaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, David Douglas Duncan and many others during its various incarnations as a weekly (1936-72), special issue (1972-78), monthly (1978-2000), and Sunday supplement (2004-2007), lives again, thanks to the new LIFE photo archive hosted by Google.

Ultimately, about 10 million photos (only about 3 percent of them ever published) will be available at Google. There's no need to wait to explore this rich photo heritage, though: about three million are already online.

So, what can you do with photos ranging from Marilyn Monroe to Winston Churchill, World War II to Vietnam, Muhammed Ali to the King of Siam? You can view photos in three different sizes, including high-resolution (5MP-6MP) sizes and use them for personal or research purposes.

To learn more about the collection, and for your chance to tell us about your favorite LIFE Magazine images, join us after the jump.

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Posted 09/03/06 at 12:48:28 PM by Josh Norem

This month we got to sample the first installment of what probably should have been called Half-Life 3. But was it worth the wait?

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