The New York Times will publish an interesting article in their Sunday Magazine on May 2nd. The author is Gary Wolf and in 'The Data-Driven Life' he takes an interesting line of thought about data and using it to give us very personal insights into our lives.
Geeky, certainly, but it offers a glimpse into something deeper and more intimate than social networking. There are some unique individuals discussed and they take extreme measures to gather personal data. For me what was interesting is how this is creating a wide range of insights and leading to commercial applications, devices and services that are already becoming mainstream.
A lot of the article also delves into health issues and mental wellbeing which you can take or leave depending on how you feel about such things. The article as a whole however is well worth the time. Read it here.
I think this work is important, and Gary's piece was seminal. These ideas generalize into a wider life-as-experiment perspective, and I'd like to link to my response and outline of how it all might fit together here: The Experiment-Driven Life (http://www.matthewcornell.org/2010/06/the-experiment-driven-life.html). Also, we're working on a tool for self-experimenters, called Edison (http://edison.thinktrylearn.com/). Great stuff!
Posted by: Matthew Cornell | Tuesday, July 27, 2010 at 08:53 AM