Browsing history
One of the things on my mental radar for 2008 (trends: tea-snobbery and "kaizen") is the mainstreaming of personal statistics - data gaterered about a specific person, presented (primarily) for the use of that same person.
The concept is already famiiar in contexts where information is captured to track progress: "gamer scores", graphs in games such as "Brain Training". Graphs produced by the Nike/iPod device. Weights and calories captured by people following diet plans.
While much of Saul Griffith's recent etech presentation about energy literacy seems familiar to anyone who's seen "An Inconvenient Truth", it's the personal statistics (starting on page 68 of the pdf) that were the most inspiring to me.
But the trend is also for the information to be produced for more esoteric reasons. The visualisations of last.fm data are potentially pretty (stats porn) and seem to adopt the same function as a photo album rather than representing actionable data. ("I note that your Portishead plays are up 15% in the last week - is everything OK?")
Visualised waymarking also seems to be fitting itself into the same space as personal photography. Take a series of lat/long positions and visualise them using a satellite map. Not owning any kind of GPS device, I've never done it myself. Certainly there have been times when the data would have been useful as an aide-mémoire. A sort of meatspace browser history.
But I've already been carrying cellphones almost everywhere for the last decade. They've been geo-locating themselves by periodically checking for the strongest (usually closest) available cell tower. I haven't been recording this data - but my mobile provider has - and they're obliged by law to keep the data for at least 12 months.
If I could go to the website of my phone company and download a csv containing the time and cell identifier that would be enough. I imagine the lat/long identifers for the cells are already known, it wouldn't take someone too long to produce a mash-up to turn my phone data into a rough explorable waymark.
I should be able to use the Data Protection Act to request this information already. But according to an article in The Guardian yesterday, it doesn't look like the phone companies are going to play ball:
"The phone companies are effectively saying: 'No, that's commercially sensitive and extraordinarily valuable data, and we're not giving it away on principle, so we'll just make up a justification.' What you got back was a pretty thin excuse, but given the history of these things, it doesn't surprise me."
So how long will it be before automatic waymarking visualisation is pitched as a consumer-level service by phone companies?
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