January is the month that people start with good intentions of completing various ‘365’ projects, with the most popular being photography. In 2010, I completed a 365 photography project on Flickr, taking a photo every day from January 1st to December 31st. It wasn’t easy, and more than a few times I nearly quit, but was encouraged and spurred on by other members of the Flickr group I was in.
The following year I made a photo book of the project which I was really pleased with. This made all of the effort the previous year worthwhile, having a physical record I could keep. I still occasionally enjoy flicking through my journal for the year and for each photo I’m taken right back to where I was and what I was doing, as powerful as a daily written diary.
The similar journal aspect is one of the reasons I like using Twitter, being able to download my tweet archive and store it somewhere safe. Although as my tweets are public I’m perhaps more selective about what I say as I would be in a private journal. I’m also aware that at any point Twitter could take my data away as technically I don’t own it (hence the reason for occasionally downloading and storing my archive).
I recently downloaded a new iPhone app, Kennedy, developed by the wonderfully talented Brendan Dawes. This is a remarkably simple app that allows you to quickly capture a single moment in time. The user interface is stripped right back and has minimal options. By simply tapping the ‘Now’ icon it captures the time of day, your location, the local weather conditions, a news headline from your preferred news source and the music you are listening to at the time. Importantly, you can also add an optional note and photo to the moment.
There are a few things I really like about this app:
- The moments are private only to you.
- You own the data and it can be exported at any time in CSV or JSON format.
- If you don’t want to add a note it takes just a mere tap of the screen to record a moment.
I saw Brendan Dawes speak at Handheld Conference in Cardiff last year and he has done all sorts of interesting data visualisations with similar captured data.
As it takes only seconds to capture a moment each day, I’m going to try and complete a ‘365 moments of 2014’ project. It’ll be private as I’ll be capturing everyday things which would be of no interest to anyone else. It’s going to be a big year of change for me and my family, and I’m interested in collecting a full year of data and then seeing if anything can be done with it in a visually interesting way. If not, I have spent only a second or two each day capturing a journal entry and not fretting about the quality of the photo or whether anyone may find my tweet vaguely interesting.
Let’s see how long I go before forgetting a day.