Category: measurement

The new examined life: ‘meaning from the mundane’

Bloggers who, like me, like to dabble in analytics, charts and graphs may find this Wall Street Journal piece titled The New Examined Life intriguing — and a bit disturbing.

It’s a story (via Murleting’s delicious links) about how the broad array of online tools at our disposal can help us measure and analyze even the most mundane of activities. Such is the case with Nicholas Felton (pictured above), a New York-based graphic designer who will boil down all his activities from the year into an annual report similar to the one he did for 2007. Felton is the Journal‘s hook to the bigger picture of our growing interest (obsession?) with “personal informatics” — something the Journal calls drawing “meaning from the mundane.”

The culture of sharing information online has shifted in recent years, from a focus on blog ramblings to the ubiquitous micro-movements of posters’ daily lives. Microblogging sites like Twitter have become commonplace. … Facebook’s News Feed feature initially drew criticism from members because it offered a running log of users’ minute postings and updates, but has since became a core part of the Web site’s community. Some sites collect data automatically for their users. Last.fm keeps a record of all of the songs users have listened to, and Netflix keeps track of members’ movie-watching habits.

“It’s a natural progression from people sharing things like movies, photos and videos,” says Dennis Crowley, founder of Dodgeball, an early social-networking service for mobile phones which was sold to Google in 2005. “What’s left to share? Basic data.”

And so we have the Internet to help us. With sites like Wordle, bloggers to create “word clouds” to quickly grasp what words or subjects they most frequently post about. (As my word cloud below suggests, I might want to quit yammering so much about Twitter.)

Wordle cloud -- via www.wordle.net
Wordle cloud -- via http://www.wordle.net

But that’s probably more than I need to be sharing. According to the Journal report, “Personal data collection can get in the way of living.”

And it seems like such a harmless pursuit. Mundane, even.

What are your top marketing challenges for 2009? Take 5 minutes to fill out a survey

Today I’m asking you to peer into your crystal ball and forecast what your top communications and marketing challenges will be for the coming year. Actually, the prognostication has already been done for you, and all I’m asking is that you take 5 minutes to complete a brief survey ranking the challenges ahead and sharing how you plan to address them.

The survey is part of an effort by Michael Stoner to take the pulse of the higher ed marketing community. Michael’s tapping into our collective wisdom to help us better understand our challenges.

The survey is the second of a two-part process. In part one, “150 thought leaders in college communications, marketing, and PR — among them leaders of the CASE commissions, PRSA’s national board, and others — were asked to identify the marketing challenges that most concerned them for the year ahead. Not surprisingly, more than half of the respondents cited financial constraints or budgetary problems as the top challenges facing their institutions.” Stoner posted a summary of the first-round results in mid-November. That post is worth a read — but you may want to wait until after you take the survey, if you’re worried that the round-one results might unduly influence you.

As a bonus for those attending the CASE District V conference coming up later this month, Stoner and company will hold a panel discussion on the subject, titled “Challenges for 2009: Dealing with New Issues or Struggling with Old Ones?” Wish I could be there. Hope someone plans to blog about it.