I was thinking again about owning your data and really it comes down to the fact that I see no real value in the data that I’m putting in to Twitter/Facebook. Yes the relationships matter, but not the data.
Data I Care About
I am an avid cyclist, so avid that I record my sleep and resting heart rate every morning. I record every workout and many months of the year I even record what I eat. That data has long term value to me. I want to know how many km’s I put on my bike last year and last month.
Currently I’m putting that data in to a bunch of different spots (Strava, Garmin Connect, Training Peaks, and the Garmin Desktop Software). Since I put it in the Garmin Desktop software I have a local copy of all my workout files, but I don’t have a copy of my resting heart rate and sleep information, nor do I have a copy of what I eat.
So this is data that I do care about, and I need to come up with a plan to own it properly. Maybe I’ll build a WordPress plugin to record it all, then a fancy UI and reporting.
2 responses to “Data I do Care About”
If you’re feeling really trendy how about Data Integration with an App on your mobile touch screen device which Siri is aware of? (This seems the way to roll). You could push the results to WordPress via xmlrpc or craft your own web service plug-in. “Siri, post my year progress summary to my Blog” (well you get the idea). You can always set up a data integration Service using Jitterbit, and if your data gets to be too much…toss it into Hadoop. Wait, you could toss it all into Hadoop to begin with then figure out the data schema later (after all you might be missing out on some additional hidden data from all these services you’re using). LOL Whatever you do…just don’t use Crystal Reports.
Yeah Hadoop is a bit much for me. I may just write a quick plugin that lets me record some of my daily fitness metrics, then late I could look at importing workouts…from devices (like Garmin).