Gordon Bell, the lifeblogger

Gordon Bell doesn’t define himself as a lifeblogger, he’s an engineer. A famous engineer at that - check out his bio and MyLifeBits project. He was one of the guys who figured out computer networking and helped kick-start the Internet. That kind of famous.

I caught up with Gordon for a conversation and interview today at his apartment in downtown Sydney that features a spectacular view over the Botanic Gardens and Sydney Harbour. We’ve met once before when I wrote about him for The Australian Financial Review. This time it was for the same publishing company, but a different project that I can’t yet announce.

We spent time talking about what it means to go completely digital and eradicate paper from your life. We’ve talked about this idea for years in the IT industry, but Gordon’s been doing it for almost a decade - with the help of research colleagues at Microsoft, mind you.

We also talked about lifeblogging, a term that describes a person’s decision to use off-the-shelf consumer technologies to digitally capture as much information about their life as possible. It occurred to me that Twitter is one technology that reflects part of what Gordon is doing. The mindset of a Twitter user is such that you’re capturing a stream of consciousness and sharing it with the world. The big difference here is that Gordon isn’t sharing volumes of data with us on the web. But he and his team are working on understanding the implications of making every personal email, voice call, video, picture, and document searchable. We talked about some of the big problems inherent in the mass consumption of digital technologies in that context - how will we protect this information and make it universally accessible in years to come if/when .jpeg or .avi is replaced by a different file type?

Another cool thing we talked about was VizzVox, a startup in Sydney and the US that Gordon has personally invested in. It’s a web-based photo and video publishing and editing tool that lets you, for example, upload your images and then record a narration using the mic on your notebook. Think ye-olde slide show for the web 2.0 age. It looks impressive and I plan on checking it out further.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for the publication of our interview in a non-paper format in the near future.