From Nike shoes that allow you to log your miles on an iPhone app, to that kid on Twitter who feels compelled to tell the world how many laps he swam each morning, self-monitoring seems to be the latest fad. I track, therefore I am.
And while there is no shortage of tools available to our inner OCD, one in particular stands out in my mind: your.flowingdata.
Created by UCLA PhD candidate Nathan Yau as part of his thesis on self-surveillance, your.flowingdata allows users to aggregate personal data through daily tweets, and then visualize it in various different formats, including graphs, treemaps and word clouds.
Obviously, as a closet obsessive-compulsive and data visualization fan, I am more than a little intrigued so I've started tracking one simple aspect of my life: my moods and their intensity during the workday (since that's when I'm mostly on Twitter).
Yes, I realize I have picked perhaps the least objective metric possible, but that's half the fun. I'm curious as much about my moods as to what might affect my perception of and decision to report on them.
More updates on that to come.
In the meantime, you can read more about your.flowingdata here.
Also, here's an older post on visualizing music consumption, another cool thing to track.
