In an effort to start track­ing some of the ideas I have while read­ing I want to start mak­ing note of ideas and ques­tions that come up here. This is the first of such posts and we’ll see what form they take in the future.

Tracking my book reading

Interesting arti­cle that exam­ines some of the frus­tra­tions with cur­rent sys­tems for track­ing read­ing habits. Since I just fin­ished writ­ing an arti­cle for The Whitman Pioneer about open knowl­edge sys­tems this got me thinking:

• What if col­leges started work­ing together on build­ing an open stan­dard for track­ing read­ing? I’m think­ing of a sys­tem that would get me set up as a Freshman with a way to keep track of every arti­cle, jour­nal essay, and book that I read while in school. Then, when I grad­u­ate I can either move the sys­tem to my server, or the col­lege pro­vides an export file to import into var­i­ous other ser­vices. If I could go back four years and be pre­sented with a choice between a school that had this sys­tem and one that didn’t I know which I would pick in a heartbeat.
• Could we con­ceive of a ser­vice that would not only track read­ing but track con­ver­sa­tions about books? What if I could record con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers about a book and upload them to a ser­vice, for­ever asso­ci­at­ing that con­ver­sa­tion with that read­ing experience?
• What good is it to track book titles and authors if I don’t also have a canon­i­cal, search­able copy of that book online?

The Data-Driven Life

Long fea­ture piece from The New York Times about the var­i­ous ways peo­ple are track­ing data about their every­day lives. It turns out that seem­ingly mun­dane things can offer remark­able insight into how our minds and bod­ies work. Couple points about this:

• All (unless I missed one) of the ser­vices men­tioned are owned by sin­gle com­pa­nies. Some, in the case of Nike+, by mas­sive cor­po­ra­tions. I think there’s a huge oppor­tu­nity for some­one to come up with an open source data track­ing sys­tem that allows users to own their data. Follow up: what hap­pens to all this won­der­ful, data-driven insight when these com­pa­nies go out of business?
• How can we tie this data-tracking to busi­ness inter­ac­tions? What ways could I track data that would reveal the com­pa­nies that most con­sis­tently affect my day in a pos­i­tive way?
• Academically, it’d be inter­est­ing to track atten­tion dur­ing a semester-long course to see which sub­jects and dis­cus­sions were most captivating.