So I was catching up on some reading on the way home tonight when I stumbled across a pretty interesting blog, that got me thinking.

You Had Me At EHLO… : Voice Mail and Discoverability with Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging.

There are a plethora of solutions and business that have been spawned by 21^st century Email bloat.  The problem is not adequately being solved because we continue to take disposable conversation mediums like voice calls, instant messages, etc… and turn them in long term, translated, full-text indexed, searchable, etc…. , historic evidence.  Storing one copy of the data is no longer good enough, we need to create full-text searchable databases witch in many cases store > 2x the original data source.  The proof is everywhere that the exponential growth of digital information is far outpacing Moore’s Law.  Just look around, I am astounded by the number of kids I see who have replace verbal conversation with an SMS (IMO a major contributor to information bloat) even when sitting right next to each other. 

Articles like this are not only scary because the world is making all forms of correspondence a matter of record which is a bit scary and Orwellian.  Remember Orwell’s 1984 was not meant to be an instructional guide but as long as we treat it that way it will continue to create a huge amount of opportunity for us in the technology sector (I am not complaining).  The need to protect and store information has never been greater and the there seems to be no slow down in the exponential growth of stored information, I sometimes question the actual need but then I double-click my CTRL and up pops Google Desktop, I punch in from:john doe and there are all the Emails I have received from John Doe.