Last month, I read a paper on Mycrocosm – briefly a site that facilitates “microblogging through stats”. So for the last month I’ve tracked everything I drank, see the graph linked below.
So – big who cares? Well, I found it interesting! For instance, there was a big jump in liquid consumption when our heating broke, and I could see that I tend to drink more when I work from home, etc. However tracking what I drank did not require much thought or effort on my part. A couple of times a day I just go to mycrocosm and add whatever I’ve drank lately – so it was a good (easy) thing to start with.
If you have a hankering to track things (I do, hence Wakoopa, last.fm, and 43places) or a need to track something it could be useful. For instance, if you were on a diet you could track everything you ate and your motivator could check up on you. You could even track everything you ate as part of a group data set, so if you were trying to lose weight with friends that might be cute. Or, if you’re training for something you could track that. Triathlon training, for example, you want to balance your training between swimming/running/biking and mycrocosm would easily allow you to track that.
And then people are using it to track more abstract things like “mood”. For the next month, I’ll be tracking “My Day in One Word”. You can see it here: Day in One Word.