2008: My digital year

At the start of the holidays I calculated my year in travel and discovered that I had done the equivalent of a circumnavigation of Mars. Since then Sarah has calculated that her year has been the equivalent of a circumnavigation of the Earth. My previous post covered my journeys in the real world but doesn't say anything about my digital life. So I thought I would account for some of my digital year during 2008.

I'll start with the area that feels like an climb up an Alp every day; emails. I get an average of 33.4 emails per day but it is growing. As you can see below, those that are specifically about my job (not general employer spam) don't make up a very large fraction of them (although those tend to come with attachments to read so take much longer to deal with).

Emails
Emails per month during 2008. Does not include spam filtered mail. Calculated by my email client. CREDIT: Stuart
Moving on to blog posts, the year started with the UK physics funding crisis which prompted a flurry of posts from me but dented my enthusisam as it wore on. Thankfully, the International Year of Astronomy is starting to pick up my mood again.

blog posts
Blog posts per month during

2008 CREDIT: Stuart
One of the other reasons for a decline in blog posts was simply a lack of time to sit down and write them. However, it doesn't take very long to post an update to Twitter so my twitter feed has seen an increase over the year. I'm tweeting 4.4 times per day on average which is probably too much. I'll try to stop it rising during 2009. Apparently the people I 'reply' to the most are @davepdotorg, @pierrenel, @orbitingfrog and @aallan. I'm also most likely to post a tweet on a Tuesday - not sure why.

Tweets
Twitter updates per month during 2008. Monthly counts from Tweetstats. CREDIT: Stuart
Another part of my digital life is my camera. These days I tend to take photos when I'm visiting somewhere interesting so the plot for the year shows Himalyan peaks that correlate to my travels and deep valleys when I'm back home. I took the most pictures in July whilst working in Belgium but Belfast (NAM), a work trip to Paris, and a weekend in the mountains of North Wales show up clearly too.

Photos
Photos per month during

2008. CREDIT: Stuart

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Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Tuesday 06th Jan 2009 (09:53 GMT) | 5 Comments | Permalink

Comments: 2008: My digital year

gravatarThis is fascinating but I don't know why! Do you think that Twitter or Email gives the best representation of your life's business as a whole?

Posted by Robert Simpson on Tuesday 06th Jan 2009 (10:23 UTC)

gravatarI would hope not :-) They're just things that can be easily quantified after the fact. Actually, I've been complaining about the volume of email more and more so it is nice to see that my complaints are justified.

I can't quantify how long I spent with friends and family, how many hours of quiet contemplation I had, how many hours I spent preparing and eating food, and how long I spent asleep. Those are ephemeral.

Posted by Stuart on Tuesday 06th Jan 2009 (10:57 UTC)

What tool did you use to measure/histogram your e-mails, twitters, and blog posts? I'm curious to see the same stats for myself.

Posted by Adam on Tuesday 06th Jan 2009 (20:12 UTC)

gravatarInteresting that you took more photos in Belgium than in any other place you visited - including Italy and Paris. Quick - someone call the Wallonia tourist board! ;-)

Posted by Sarah on Wednesday 07th Jan 2009 (09:02 UTC)

gravatarAdam, I used the mail statistics plugin for Thunderbird. For twitter I used TweetStats. For blog posts I simply counted them on my archive page.

Sarah, it was spread over a month and many of them were taken within the Centre Spatial de Liege.

Posted by Stuart on Wednesday 07th Jan 2009 (11:02 UTC)

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