Nicola's E-learning and Digital Cultures Blog

This week on the official course bit of the Digital Cultures blog Jen and Sian had a natter about the Lifestreams which made me have a proper think about what I am collecting and how.

I tend to take the view that my Lifestream tracks me but this is a convenient way of saying I am rather intimidated by the volume of personal metadata I create in the average day. I signed up to Google’s Web History opt-in service a few years ago and this week I took a look at it to see what kind of personal metadata I’m clocking up there. I have made, apparently, some 8907 searches so far since 2007. That seems like a lot and, digging around, reveals a lot of information that really gets into the heart of what I’m thinking, doing, looking at on any given day. My shopping searches map to all my major purchases in the last few years, image searches are more random. Web searches are about everything but Blog searches are about work. There are some sites I have no recollection of in my history. It’s fascinating, and I can also see when and where I made those searches:

Apparently I am a really big lunchtime searcher. Having seen my Google search stats I also had a look at my Twitter Trends:

There are things I can learn from these stats that I don’t otherwise know about myself. I know that at the weekend I search and Tweet less as I am often away from my computer. I didn’t realise that Monday and Thursday were both peak days for me. Knowing this I can see it in how I conduct my day to day work but if you had asked me I am not sure I would have picked the same days. Although coincidentally Monday and Thursday tend, for various reasons, to be the day I spend most hours at work in the week so perhaps that explains the increased activity on those days.

There are some other stats I could look at that show an activity/reward cycle, such as my stats from Flickr:

Although Flickr does not email me about my stats or show them to directly on the login screen I do look at them from time to time and I have been able to identify my own pattern: when I upload a lot of images I get added to  the public timeline; I get new viewers to my images; my stats zap up. Mostly I am not too bothered about my stats but from time to time I’ll be a bit more strategic about how and when I upload to see if I can boost my numbers a little. And that’s part of the reason I’m talking about my stats here: when I know what it is that I am doing it changes how I feel about that activity to an extent. I am used to measuring my work, to an extent, in my workplace and I am used to presenting material for assessment around this MSc (and study more widely), but I am less accustomed to taking a proper review of my personal activity online and seeing how that compares to what I want to achieve, how I want to be seen, etc. And although not quite all of my activity make it into the lifestream it is a pretty representative percentage.

I do have one major frustration with the Lifestream plugin though – non of my tags, text notes etc. about LifeStream items are collated – I would love to be able to bundle things by day, type, tag etc. across mediums as I already can in some discreet social spaces. I am particularly disappointed as I have been self-conciously adding notes to Delicious and only the link seems to come through to the LifeStream.

This Week

So looking at this week’s activities in my LifeStream here is what occurs:

• I actually spent a lot of time reading printed copies of the last of this fortnight’s articles. And stuff for work. And the latest issue of Wired. I measured none of this in my LifeStream as I can think of no more efficient way than tweeting as I read which seems neither practical nor fair on my non-student followers/friends who see all my updates. Bring on smart electronic paper!
• I spent a lot of the week watching and sharing bad Microsoft ads after Charlie Brookers article on Mac Monks hit viral levels at work and home.
• I listened to a lot of music and, oddly, very perky music at that. This is unusual as I tend to listen to podcasts but this week was heavy on writing and exhaustion for me so the music kept me peppy after long social/homework evenings.
• Tweets this week were text heavy. I apparently often Tweet my full 14o characters and, for the Twittorials in particular, I find even this close to impossible as I used to review films (and still do on occasion) and therefore see so many different ways in which I wish to approach my views on a film, even a short one.
• I met a lot of people I have known online but never met before. I found it curious with just about everyone seeming the same offline as they do online only taller/shorter/fatter/thinner than their pictures to varying degrees. I did find it odd how jealous I felt of those people I hadn’t met before who had met, or had whole social lives, with each other. It played into my childish insecurities about being left out of the loop. This is something that any number of communications methods can cause though: today I had a text to announce, specifically to me, the birth of a baby I didn’t even know had been conceived!
• I spent some of the week looking at online publishing platforms for a friend and trying to work out how I could explain that the full text was the only way to be searchable and visible when I know she spent years compiling a book she wishes to distribute in a tightly controlled printed format (but wants to promote online). I was impressed at some of the new sites for online publishing and once again wondered how much work it would take to regularly produce an online zine. The web is such a powerful publishing platform, and so cheap, that it can be very inspiring even though a good paper zine has a smell and feel all of it’s own.
• I registered for several online or short in-person conferences, all of them free. I wondered how I was supposed to find out about the authoritative conferences in an emergent area like my own. It is a difficulty since the boundaries, metaphors and variable experience levels of attendees can make an event either valuable and exciting or repetitious and depressing. There are a huge number of free events in social media but I think has less to do with inherant qualities of the online spaces, instead I think it is because of technological fashions (something raised interestingly in Upgrade Me on BBC4 tonight) and the sponsership allowed by the inclusion of for-profit speakers keen to jump onboard the tech du jour.
• I made several (unsuccessful) attempts to Wave at people with my new shiny Google Wave preview account, it was rather a shame as everyone was very excited but failing to connect with anyone else!
• I found out about an extremely cool phone app for participating in educational life. It is called campusM and will be launching soon. The app looks like such a sensible idea that I flip flopped from thinking that the netbook might be THE convergence device of the future, to thinking that the mobile web is the future, desktop machines are the past. On a related communications evolution note I very much enjoyed What Technology Owes to the Literary Enlightment (a Radio 4 Choice item from a few weeks back).
• I Tweeted a lot about the film festival, but evidently I did that when everyone else was offline so I did a little shouting into space. I also followed, in real time, a friend on his journey home from a night out as he gradually worked out that there might be an issue with his debit card and then as he had his card eaten by the machine, at which point I replied to check he was ok. This epitomizes the personal serendipidous web to me.
• I finally posted a lot of pictures of flowers (not shown here) that I had taken with a new camera which I am still getting used to. Having been inadvertantly lectured about how digital photograhs simply never look as good as hand developed film images I decided it was a good idea to remind myself how beautiful the digital images actually can be.
• I had a bit of feminist week attending a Girl Geek Dinner, listening to peculiar episodes of InBiz and wondering all week how to get a mention of inspirational women & technology artist Cornelia Sollfrank into my homework… Oh I just did!