Personal Datamining

= using collected digital data, not for sharing, but for acquiring personal insights.

See the Datablogging tools developed by Reger.com

Background

Context at http://www.joereger.com/entry-logid7-eventid4756-datablogging-Value-for-Bloggers-.log

"People use Reger.com to track their sex lives, pot smoking habits, running workouts and relationship status... all behind private logs... they get their graphs but they don't share their data with the world. We gain an immense sense of pride and responsibility from that fact and stride to do what's best with that trust.

We see so much value for bloggers with datablogging when they just keep their own data and mine it themselves... no network effect... no mashups... no Web 2.0. Maybe it's simply the perspective we've gained from doing datablogging for many years. Maybe the ratio of private to public blogs on our service is much higher than on, say, Typepad... meaning that people use Reger.com more for storing things that they don't want to share..."

Examples

Running data. Conception data. Body weight data. Diabetes data. Headache data.

Slut factor case study

By Joe Reger at http://www.joereger.com/entry-logid7-eventid4756-datablogging-Value-for-Bloggers-.log

"“About three years ago a young woman decided to track her sex life with Reger.com’s datablogging service. She was using a Sex Log that tracked sex partner, intimacy rating, orgasm rating, who initiated, etc. And she decided to make it public. Of course, I immediately subscribed to it via RSS like any good horny geek would :)

Over the course of a few months she blogged about having sex with quite a few people. Using our graphing component she created a pie chart of her partners and the number of times she had sex with them. It started out as a solid circle. Then it was cut in half when she found another sex partner. Then in thirds.

Before I knew it her sex partner graph looked like a freakin’ pizza pie… small slivers… she must have had fifteen partners inside of two months. “What a slut,” I thought… and went on with my life. (After telling my RSS reader to check her feed every hour, instead of every day.)

Then one day something special happened. She was writing about her sexual encounters over the last few months in a blog entry. Reviewing her graphs. Kind of a nostalgic piece. All of a sudden she says something to the effect of “oh my gosh, I just looked at my graph… I’m slutty!”

After I pulled myself off the floor from laughing so hard, I realized that something special had happened. Of course she was slutty… I had noted as much a month before. Anybody who knew her probably knew she was slutty. But she didn’t!

She didn’t know she was slutty!

Until she tracked the data, graphed it and analyzed it. Datablogging had given this young woman insight into her life. For me this was a watershed moment in datablogging. It was proof-of-principle that datablogging can help us learn about ourselves in ways that other tools can’t. Sure, she probably had an inkling as she dropped trow for that fifteenth guy that maybe she was slutty, but datablogging brought it into conscious focus for her… a graph representing her sluttyness… her slut factor.” (http://www.joereger.com/entry-logid7-eventid4756-datablogging-Value-for-Bloggers-.log)