Fascinating. And I agree with you that the intellectual property issues are much greater than Gemmell acknowledges.
http://chutry.wordherders.net/archives/003244.html
Minds me of Benjamin on unpacking his library crossed with meeting the ghosts in/of Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive. Anne Galloway at Purse Lips Square Jaw has a recent entry on a rant by Brenda Laurel the Spectacle and digital games that crosses nicely with the theme of collecting and recording... See
http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/2005_02_01_blogger_archives.php#110834618733244017
MyLifeBits assumes that one own's one's perceptions. To whom belongs the collective response of the crowd at a rock concert. Indeed is there but one collective response? Perceptions are interlocking. We experience each other perceiving the world. That means at any moment we can in the words of Jerome Bruner "go meta". The technology of storage serves the life practices of sorting. From a chronological perspective, the life practices probably predate the technology. From a logical perspective storage, a place to put, precedes, the decision what to put there? I'm not so sure because in very many ways a storage device is a what. And storage devices are contained by containers... (Cathexis and object manipulation and memory work and imagination) O the thin thin line between MyLifeBits and my life in bits.
Richness may not be related to the number of stored items but to the weaving of the interconnections between them.
While the project as a whole may (or may not) be new, there are definitely precedents for some of its pieces. Steve Mann wore a wireless camera and broadcast everything he saw onto the Internet starting back in 1994; see the WearCam project, ( http://wearcam.org/ ). Mary Flanagan's [ phage ] ( http://www.maryflanagan.com/virus.htm ) operates much as the screen saver described here does, taking text and images from your hard disk and arraying them on-screen. And there's Bradley Rhodes's Remembrance Agent ( href="http://www.remem.org/ ) and all sorts of other related work.
While it's interesting to combine some ideas from artists and technologists to come up with a large-scale project like this, I find it very uninteresting when the people who do so ignore the difference between atoms and bits, and when they think about their project in a politically lobotomized way. Brushing off issues like DRM and mentioning in an offhand way that the system will actually be more of an Amazon search interface than an archive is particularly disappointing, given that the people who did the earlier work have already thought a lot about the political and social consequences of personal surveillance and access to records of your past.