ZDNet's David Coursey talks to senior researcher, Gordon Bell, and looks at new software by Microsoft Research's Media Presence Group that gives people the ability to record and archive their entire life using audio, video and still images in the software program.

The MyLifeBits project is concerned with putting all personal media online (where “media” includes documents, in addition to images, audio and video). The first phase was devoted to capturing most of Gordon Bell’s information: about 20,000 documents (scanned/OCRed), 40,000 emails, 8,000 photos, 7 GB of music, and 3 GB of video. The next phase of MyLifeBits is the creation of a personal media database. All media may be annotated with text or audio, and assigned to sets/categories. Query results from the database will be displayed in several ways, including the familiar displays of Windows Explorer. They may also be rendered in a timeline. Selected results may be gang-annotated. Or, they may be dragged and dropped into authored stories (time-lines, photo albums, or highlight reels). MyLifeBits will use the full text search supported in SQL server.

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