A much too short description.

A short 2011 YouTube video posted by (apparently) a fan of Bell's gives Bell an opportunity to briefly explain the basic tenets of his project. Bell makes it clear from the outset that the objective of the project is:

to capture everything in your life

As Bell describes it, the original intent wasn't to store everything. That ultimate goal seemed to logically grow out of the scanning of more and more documents. Jim Gemmell, a colleague of Bell's, notes they realized that there wasn't much to be done with all the scanned material. They realized that they needed software that could work with all that digitized material, software that would make the saving worthwhile.

Victoria Rozycki, Bell's assistant at Microsoft, comments at the end the video that it was the continued accumulation of more and more material that inevitably raised the question:

Now we have all this information, what do we do with it? How do we work with it, how do we organize it so that it's usable for the average person?

That's an important question, but it also begs a perhaps more important one: Does the "average person" really want to use it?

Bell, at least at an earlier stage in his project, was looking far into the future. A 2013 CNBC report on Bell quotes him:

My real belief is that we will be able to provide an afterlife conversational avatar [at some future point]. ... There's no reason you can't have that, like one would see in Wikipedia, but have that more conversational and in more detail. ... You could ask it about parts of your life and hear [stories].

I'm far from convinced that the "average person" really wants that.

Go to: The unbearable tedium of life-logging.