DailyDirt: Personal Analytics.. On The Rise?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Mar 12th 2012 5:00pm — Michael Ho

We've talked about lifelogging a bit before, where people record nearly every moment of their lives (and make it public somehow). Ignoring Facebook statuses from people's running shoes is just the beginning. Here are a few more examples.

Stephen Wolfram posted an analysis of his emails/keystrokes/phonecalls for the past decade or so. If he ever publishes the raw data, it'll be pretty simple to figure out all of his passwords. [url]
XKCD covers lifeloggers with a nice comic that summarizes a typical technogeek dad. "I'm glad I'm not the clueless person I was 5 years ago, but now I don't want to get any older." [url]
Ben Fogarty plotted his life in a stacked area chart from age 0 to 32. It's a cool chart, but the area under "listening" as an activity makes it look like he went deaf at age 27. [url]
To find some more bizarre/crazy stuff, check out some things that other StumbleUpon users have found. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: lifelogging, quantified self, stephen wolfram, visualizations, xkcd

6 Comments

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Anon Coward, 12 Mar 2012 @ 10:34pm

It seems weird to me that Techdirt always seems to recommend SU to their readers at the end of these recaps, especially considering that SU doesn't disclose when they are being paid to show a website vs. when someone is being entertained through a legitimate stumble. In the efforts towards full disclosure can Techdirt verify that you're not receiving compensation to link to them each week or if so, could you at least disclose that if these posts are really an ad. I'm all for infotainment, but there needs to be some transparency.
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Melissa Ruhl (profile), 12 Mar 2012 @ 11:18pm

Re:
I think it's fantastic that we are essentially getting ad free blogging on TechDirt. If they do some subtle advertising, I could care less. At least it's interesting. :)
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F!, 13 Mar 2012 @ 12:41am

"Personal Analytics.. On The Rise?"
Um, of course personal analytics are on the rise? Given the current state of technology and the increasing ubiquity and decreasing cost of ever-shrinking computing and data compiling devices, I'd venture to guess that we're still in the pre-dawn hours. Soon we'll be able to share everything including our brainwave responses to political speeches online.

The REAL challenge is for those of us who would find this self-indulgent introspection fascinating to have a way to do this without every tiny detail of our person automatically being processed by the likes of Google, Microsoft, Apple, et al...
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Michael Ho (profile), 13 Mar 2012 @ 1:25pm

Re:
One of our consistent themes around here is that "content is advertising, and advertising is content" -- so it shouldn't be that strange that we like how StumbleUpon provides both. However, I'm not sure where you get the idea that SU doesn't clearly disclose what is sponsored and what isn't sponsored. If you look at SU's top bar, it will say "sponsored" when SU is showing an ad:
http://i.imgur.com/fapol.png

To be transparent, we have no formal agreement with StumbleUpon -- but SU users seem to like to stumble us, so we feel it's nice for us to recommend SU back to our audience to build up our traffic a little. These posts can be considered an ad depending on how you define advertising... but we're just trying to provide entertaining content and links.
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Michael Ho (profile), 13 Mar 2012 @ 1:26pm

Re: Re:
Thanks, Melissa!
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sprearson81 (profile), 10 Jun 2012 @ 9:12am

Now that's quite a chart from Mr Fogarty!
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