Who doesn't love pretty pictures?

persona

My ‘persona,’ via some crazy Media Lab grad student’s project - mostly (it seems) built from some snippet of text a friend wrote about me once, that seems to have since dropped off the internet.

Everyone likes pretty pictures. And most of the nerdy part of “everyone” likes graphs. And everyone definitely likes to learn about themselves - which is why I have so much fun exploring sites like mint and me-trics - though it seems like other random takes on personal analytics (e.g. your.flowingdata - more details here) are popping up left and right as well.

All the pain in these applications, though, is the actual collection of the data - I think it’d be incredibly interesting (if extraordinarily creepy) if the information was captured for me, and all I had to do was consume it. Mint does a decent job, though it’s focused on the area of “personal data” that leaves the largest paper trail - so it still can’t tell me how many snack breaks I take while at my computer, or the average number of times I hit ‘snooze’ before I get up on work days.

One of these days. Someone needs to build an accelerometer-equipped-image-recognition-machine-learningy widget to capture this data, and the software to process it :)

Let me know what you think on Twitter.