2 min read

Digital Life and Personal Data Analysis

This picture (by newsobserver.com) took from Wake County Library Book Fair in North Carolina Fairground where I also went to pick up some books.

I was and still is a big book (almost paper books) fan. But when I was standing among the 450,000 used books in the book fair, I felt depressed and reluctantly had an impression: the paper  books will and should go away in the future.  eBooks will not fade away and they also have the economical, ecological and even aesthetical advantages.

Books are good(hundred and thousand years ago, our ancestors read books in silk, bamboo, shell, stone, …), new paper books are good too. But the massive used books are burdens. I like the smell of ink of paper books but only for the new. The 450, 000 used books only have some recycling values: you can get a bag of books only for only 1 buck in the last exhibition day!

Digital Life and Personal Data Analysis

eBook is one part of our digital library. We also have eMails, eBills, Tweets … and these data are born for analysis: complete, accurate, well formatted while in time(again, analytical advantage!).

DailyOutgoingEmails

Stephen Wolfram, the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, posted an analysis of his personal emails as above. That’s cool and you might know that years ago a writer would transcribe at least two copies of his/her mail, one for sending out and another for archiving (and publishing).

Liza Lucas of SAS JMP R&D also contributed a page on her graphical financial life while the data come from a online personal financial management system:

Back to reading. Below is my daily readings via Google Reader (in laptop and phone) in the past 30 days:

chart

Haa, I should clean up my subscribes now.