L1: What’s a Quantified Self Worth? [Mini-Survey]By Kim Gaskins February 2, 2012
Latitude’s L1 activities are designed to let individuals engage with us in playful, “bite-sized” ways, providing us with different, ongoing data streams that we can analyze and share as insights with our community. We’ll continue to add new, interesting ways for you to engage with us and become an active contributor to our research. Check back at latd.com for L1 findings or connect with us on Twitter and Facebook.
This Week’s Topic: The Quantified Self
Update: This survey is now closed to participants, check out the results here!
Many people are familiar with the story of two innovators at Wired, co-founder Kevin Kelly and contributing editor Gary Wolf, who picked up on the rise in self-tracking tendencies, and created a blog called “The Quantified Self” in 2008 to explore the topic further. Now, with the growing popularity of mobile apps (like Mint, LoseIt and RunKeeper) and new sensor-based gadgets (like headbands that track your sleep cycles and GPS-enabled Nike+ shoes), most tech-forward people have dabbled in self-quantification. Why are we so captivated by data-driven self-knowledge? Because “unless something can be measured, it cannot be improved,” Kelly tells us.
Because self-tracking isn’t anything new to many of us, we’re already generating loads of data—and companies are, more and more, realizing the value of this data. Interestingly, a recent survey found that individuals think of personal data-sharing with companies as a two-way street, with 86% of consumers seeing major benefits to sharing their data with businesses online. Understanding why, how, and with whom we share our data is becoming an increasingly interesting and complex task as new self-quantification tools and possibilities arise.
Update: This survey is now closed to participants, check out the results here!
Image credit: Riaz Kanani, (cc) some rights reserved.
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