Gyroscope. The best quantified self app I’ve found. Gyroscope collects all the bits of data you log across various services and devices. It then displays things in daily and weekly logs that are beautiful. Hat tip Bryce.
Tag: data
Medium’s metric that matters: Total Time Reading:
I sometimes characterize Medium as content matchmaking: we want people to write, and others to read, great posts. It’s two-sided: one can’t exist without the other. What is the core activity that connects the two sides? It’s reading. Readers don’t just view a page, or click an ad. They read.
If the pace at which you receive new metrics outstrips the pace at which you can change your newsroom’s priorities, then what’s the point?
Your Metrics Are Bad and Why “Data Driven” Isn’t Enough:
I’ve long felt that having bad metrics is often worse than having no metrics at all.
Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to its servers. Shouldn’t this be the kind of shady behavior that an app store review process prevents? Would be fantastic to see answers to these 3 questions.
Update: Path’s CEO answered those three questions a minute after I posted this. His response to #2 is a cop out. “Industry best practice” is just a way of avoiding blame. Protect your users data and do what’s right, not what’s typical.
The Information Arms Race. A fascinating but terrifying look at the way data is driving political strategies in campaign season. Some of the targeting statistics are mind blowing.
The shape of our future book
The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don’t directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data.
Craig Mod – The shape of our future book.
Index your city: An idea for local news
A while back I moved into a new apartment in Portland. It’s in a great neighborhood and a terrific building. One of the best parts is the top floor view of Lone Fir Cemetery across the street. It’s a cemetery that saw its first burial in 1846 and has quite a bit of history tied to it.
What is interesting to me is that on the edge of this massive, historic cemetery is an empty corner of land. It’s roped off and is mostly gravel. After digging through Wikipedia’s footnotes I found that this lot is tied to some controversy.
The one useful article I could find online states that:
The county would go ahead with plans to tear down its building at the corner of Southeast Morrison Street and 20th Avenue — a squat beige box and parking lot built atop the graves of Chinese immigrants buried there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
To me that’s fascinating. It’s a corner of land that has roots going back over 100 years but is still empty and unmarked. There’s no reason I should have to dig through Wikipedia and track down an Oregonian article re-posted on another site to find that out.
Dave Winer says that, “Rule #1 of local blogging: If you hear fire trucks in the night, in the morning you should be able to find out where the fire was.” If that’s local blogging then a thriving local news ecosystem should adopt a mindset akin to “If you have a question about something in our city, we’ll answer it for you.”
The Oregonian, or a startup news service, is missing a golden opportunity here. Portland is a town with pretty well-defined neighborhoods that each have their unique histories. Someone who can index those locations as well as the news and history of each has created a solid product which they can deliver to residents as well as visitors.
A personal archive
This was a lot of excitement for one year. Since the whole point of Pinboard is to be around for the long haul, I’m hoping for much less of it in the year to come. A personal archive works a little bit like a bank – you want to be able to use it and forget about it, rather than see it pop up in the evening news.
maciej – Two years of Pinboard.
ProPublica’s newest news app uses education data to get more social. A really interesting app from ProPublica that analyzes data released by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Even though it hits just a few data points it is fascinating to compare various districts and schools.