meish dot org: life, unfolding

I just received my Dopplr annual report - a sumptuous morsel of design-and-data loveliness containing summary information about my travels last year.

Here’s a chunk of mine:

I like the combination of various kinds of information, the design (beautiful, though I wonder why they used CC-licensed images rather than my photos of trips, since I’ve linked my accounts? And how were the particular highlighted trips chosen?) plus the navelgazingly personal nature of it - those are my trips, my stats, my miles. The Dopplr report tells me that I was away for 106 days - nearly a third! - of last year. And that I’ve travelled 21% of the distance to the moon. And elsewhere in the document, it revealed that I have the personal velocity of a butterfly.

All of this is fascinating and revealing.

But now I want to know….

…..What was the longest period between trips (I think several months) and the shortest (pretty sure it was 24 hours)?
…..How many trips were within the UK?
…..How many by train?
…..If all my train journeys last year were placed end to end, how far could I go?
…..Which place did I visit most often?
…..How many of those 106 days of travel were for work, and how many were personal?
…..Did any day or time of month trend particularly highly? For example, did I seem to travel a lot at the start of months, and most often on a Tuesday?

I sort of want to be able to download the raw data from my Dopplr account (not the detail of the trips, but a juicy CSV doc with lots of info in it - dates, miles, method of transport…) so I can fiddle around with it and figure out all of the above, and more.

Now, I like data, and I like data visualisations even more, and I find services into which you can feed fairly mundane information regularly and have delivered back to you a tasty chunk of infoporn, basically irresistable.

But things like this, as beautiful as they are, pique my interest, get me thinking, and inevitably leave me wanting more.

I’ve got a fever, and the only cure is…more cowbell data.

Other datarich visualisations from the last year, all of which leave me with questions (in a good way) include Twitter (here’s my stats, which I blogged about a couple of months ago, plus last.fm (turns out I listened to a lot of Zoe Keating, Miss Kittin and Elbow last year) though as this visualisation tool shows, a lot of that listening occured with very specific periods of the year (when I was reading a particular book, as it happens, which means that whenever Zoe Keating comes up on shuffle on my ipod, I am transported back to the plot and setting of that novel - very evocative).

I also learn that I have a super-eclectic score of 761/1000, which apparently gives me bragging rights, but I think the creator of that app may be conflating obscurity with quality: some bands are obscure for a reason.

And of course there’s some lovely stats and sparklines available for Flickr Pro accounts (mine reveals that my most popular image ever is one of an apologetic handwritten sign in a Starbucks doorway the day of the London bombing in July 2005.)

Are there any more sites or apps with similar data juiciness? Bring ‘em on.

UPDATE!

Thanks to the fabulously clever Paul Mison, and his snaptrip app (which he mentions in the comments below), I have been able to ascertain that in 2008 my transportation types broke out like this:

And that if all my rail journeys were put together, they’d take me from Moscow to Beijing and back, along the trans-Siberian express, followed by a one-way trip to the Baltic seaside at Gdansk in Poland, or 113 return trips from London to Brighton.

Also, I flew nearly twice around the world last year (erk!) and drove three times the length of Chile.