Scott Rosenberg has a good post up about data retention, data searching and the challenge it creates for both corporations and individuals. He notes:
The “one big pile” method has the overwhelming appeal of liberating us from the role of digital janitor. (The principle lies at the heart of David Weinberger’s new book Everything is Miscellaneous — more on that soon, since I’m interviewing Weinberger for Salon.) But our opportunities to employ it remain limited. Gmail lets us treat our email as one big pile. Delicious lets us treat our bookmarks that way; Flickr, our photos.
But the biggest piles of all can be found on our hard disks. And they remain nearly impossible to treat in “big pile” mode. Google Desktop gives us an inkling, but its uses are limited. WinFS was supposed to transform the Windows file system into a Web 2.0-compliant, metadata-rich delight, but it’s vaporware. ITunes relieves us of managing our music files, but that’s just one corner of the personal-data universe.
This is somewhat the same challenge that David Gelernter is talking about in his worldbeam work, as well, and it is the problem that Google and others have said they exist to solve. I actually see this as a combination of search and storage, and the ability to replicate in multiple places. Whenever possible, I want documents and data locally, on whatever device I have most available, not somewhere in the cloud. And Scott nails it when he calls out the biggest problem of all -- changing people's behavior in terms of how/why/where they store their ever-increasing amount of stuff.