Digital Memories - A Google TechTalk

In this video, Steve Whittaker from Sheffield University talks about recent research in the area of Digital Memories - storing information about personal events spanning an entire lifetime in digital format, with obvious opportunities for mining all kinds of interesting patterns. It can also open up a particular branch of mining applications specifically geared at providing personalized, easy to interpret results to end users.

This video has a very interesting slide on research results showing how we tend to apply counter productive strategies for dealing with information overload (an idea I had already heard about on Merlin Mann's techtalk on Inbox Zero) - the more folders for categorizing stuff you have, the more folders with little use (2 or less items) are created. Likewise, the time spent in figuring out bookmark categories is not time well spent since over 40% of them are never used. It appears a better strategy is to just archive off this information and retrieve it later by searching.