Chapter 1: Digital Memories and the Personal Content Explosion 3 have interacted with. It is content that forms, in increasing amounts, the record of your own invaluable personal history. As your personal content is getting digital, the ways you create, share, and experience 2 it are also about to change. The transition from analogue (or physical, if you prefer) to digital personal content is much more fundamental than it fi rst appears. Digital content is not merely an addition to analogue personal content, but rather is the dominant way to manage and experience personal content – or most parts of it. Once the content is in digital form, it can be manipulated in countless ways, reused, distributed, and shared with practically no extra effort, and experienced through a variety of differ- ent devices. As a consequence, new behavioural patterns will appear as the way people capture, share, and re-live their experiences and personal history changes. Consider an obvious case – photography. The digital change has become strikingly evident in this domain. The sales of digital cameras have surpassed the sales of traditional fi lm cameras, and today the sales fi gures are astonishing – for instance, during the fi rst seven months of 2006, the sales of digital cameras grew by 20.3%, while the sales of 3 fi lm cameras went down by 67.1%. This implies that the services offering analogue fi lm development are becoming rare and expensive, which further boosts the trend of personal content digitalization. As a consequence, people are now taking digital photos instead of fi lm photos. But what do they do with the photos? Some people use digital cameras just as they used fi lm cameras. They print out the photos, and then sweep the memory card clean as if changing the fi lm, and continue shooting. However, many people transfer the images to a PC, a set top box, or some other digital storage device. Even the photos that are not printed are in most part retained. Over the years, this collection of personal information becomes invaluable. It is content that people wish to access, share, sometimes re-organize, but defi nitely not lose. But it is not just photographs that we are talking about here. While photographs often depict important bits and pieces of our personal histories, so do messages sent and received; personalization settings for our devices; self-created and maintained characters in an online game; ratings given to a certain song; health information measured and recorded by devices such as heart rate monitors; music listened to on a special occasion; and so on. 2 Content created by the users themselves is also sometimes referred to as “Consumer Created Content”, or CCC. 3 http://www.imaging-resource.com/NEWS/1158601458.html