I’m re-thinking what my personal hub homepage, busterbenson.com, will be in its next iteration. I’ve been aggregating my online content since 1999 (I lost my first few months of online mayhem from diaryland.com because I got kicked off in 1998), and have recently been trying to find interesting things to do with all of this “stuff” I’ve written, collected, commented on, and otherwise stashed.  I just checked and it looks like I’m about to break 1,000,000 words… or about 4,000 pages of personal content.

I recently went back and cleaned up some of the data.  I used the Flickr, Twitter, Foursquare, and other apis to go back and store full XML data about all of my past Flickr, Twitter, and Foursquare posts.  I also went back and archived any geo-location data that any of these services attach to posts.  And I also archived all of the photo information so I can better manipulate it in the future should I ever want to.

The next version of the site will be inspired by a couple different things.  I do want to make my personal footstream visible.  I also want to distinguish between content that I make (my blog posts, tweets, and photos) and content that I “like” from others (faved tweets, favorited Flickr photos, shared Google Reader items, liked Tumblr posts, Delicious links, etc).

I also want to tell a better story about how I exist in this world.  How I choose what to work on, how to work on it, etc.  I want to tie in my life outline, as well as my rules for living, and my general outlook on life.

From there I started thinking about how there are certain big themes in my work that I am somewhat obsessed with and constantly return to.  So I made a list of interests that I had.  I rated each interest on my level of interest and also on my level of experience with that interest.  That created a really interesting picture of my interests that I hadn’t considered before.  How, some of my interests are brand new, and how some are decades old.  And yet, they somehow work together, and it almost seems like there’s a method to the interest evolution over time.

Common themes include: smaller-sized projects, quick development, highly interactive, somehow linked to passions, goals, and knowing the self, while building tools that make insight into the self and into my goals easier and more accessible to others.

It’s interesting enough that I think I’m going to flesh out the list of interests, rate them on experience, and then also rate them on my current commitment to the interest and my perceived availability to develop that interest in the future both for myself and as a service to others.

Who knows if it’ll go anywhere, but it clicks with my brain right now.

Today is my 100th straight day of writing 750 words a day.  I missed January 1st, so I’m not going to be able to get a full calendar year streak, but I do hope to get to 365 days in a row.  They say it takes 30 days to start a habit, or maybe 90 days if you are conservative, but I don’t think I can really say that writing every day is now a “habit” so much as something that I just like to do.

What is a habit anyway?  The implication is that it’s something that you do automatically, without thinking.  Something that would be difficult to stop doing, even if you wanted to.  But the point of writing every day is to get out of the “automatic” kind of thinking that habits are made out of.  It requires a bit of brute force to write 750 words, and it’s not something that you just do… it has to be intentional every time, and that’s the magic of it, I think.

So, I can’t say that writing every day is a habit, even after 100 days.  It is a proof of concept for me, really.  The point of building this website was to build something truly useful, something that helped me (and others) tap into the subconscious area of my/their brain, to dig up thoughts that rarely saw the light of day.  To complete incomplete thoughts.  Close old loops of the brain that have been unresolved.  Really get to the bottom of things.  Because I strive to be at the bottom of things.

Writing 750 words is like swimming to the bottom of a swimming pool.  It takes a bit of effort but you can get there, no problem.  And there’s a certain perspective at the bottom of the pool that you can’t really get anywhere else in or out of the pool.  Of course, you can’t stay there, you can’t just keep writing 30 words a minute for the entire day, you’ll run out of breath.  Eventually you have to go back to the surface and take a breath.  But maybe the quality of that breath will also have something unique about it.  A bit of the bottom of the pool in it.  And who knows how long that lasts, before the above water world sinks in and it’s difficult to remember exactly what was so neat about the bottom of the pool.  But then, you do it again the next day, and the next and the next, and 100 days later the two worlds begin to blend together.  You can summon the feeling of clarity of thought while above water, and you can think about the above water world even while down at the bottom of the pool.  There’s a permeability about it, of worlds fusing together, where complex thoughts and a zillion distractions can live side by side.  That’s my top-of-the-head metaphor for the value of daily private writing.

I had a feeling about it when I started this project, but of course there are a million feelings about a million things that end up not being true.  The only way to know if a feeling is right is to follow it to the end of its rope.  If I can continue writing 750 words a day for 100 days, or 365 days, of 10 years, or the rest of my life, then I will be able to tell whether or not there is value in doing it.

I’ve gotten a lot of amazing feedback from people too.  As of last night, 99 other people are on streaks of 30 days or more.  That’s pretty amazing to me, that others are as into this as I am.  To see that many people also being able to find the drive and motivation to start a new daily habit is something that I didn’t expect.  I’m a bit of a challenge junkie, if you know me, so it made sense that I’d be able to do it, but these 99 others are people who I don’t even know, and haven’t really had to pitch the idea to.  I think that’s awesome, anyway.

Since starting the project at the beginning of the year, over 18,000 people have logged in to the site to write 750 words.  Over 46,000 days have been completed… meaning that there are over 46,000 days of 750 words or more.  41,819,906 words have been written.

The project is also being sustained by the good will of its members through an idea I called Patronage.  I suggest a monthly donation of $3-4, but don’t require it.  Each month of Patronage earns the user the ability to write a note on the site (the only publicly viewable user content on the site) either as a testimonial, a feature request, a self-promotional note about something they think others would like, an incentive to complete the monthly challenge, or a request to send a larger portion of the monthly patronage to our local charity, 826 Seattle.  Even though there are almost no social networking features on the site, a sense of community is emerging from the people who are on the site, and it’s one of the things I’m most excited to explore in the future.  The irony of creating a community out of a site dedicated to private journaling is not lost on me.

In any case, I’m over my 750 words now and am curious to see if my new Pheonix badge is visible from the stats page.  Who’s going to be the next one to make it to 100 days in a row?

Now that Twitter has lat/long data per-tweet, and Foursquare is growing, and Flickr has had location data attached to pictures for a while now, it begs the question… where have I been?

I would love to have a little map that can show me not only where I’ve been, but the order I went there, and the distance traveled, and the speed of travel, and the amount of time traveling.  Little personal footstreams.

Which days, weeks, or months did I cover the most ground?  Are there patterns of travel during a day, during a season, etc. What’s my personal weather history?  How does my stream of travel relate to the kinds of things I post, pictures I take, etc.

SimpleGeo might be able to help make this even more interesting.  For some reason I can’t quite wrap my head around them though.  I want all of my locations..  are they actually indexing this and can I query for it?  It would be great if I could just give them my Twitter account, Foursquare account, and Flickr account and get back amazing maps full of amazing data.  But I don’t think they’re quite there yet.  Or even going there.

All the data’s here, we just need to connect it.  Once I get a few minutes, one of these days, I’ll give it a try.  For now I am just curious if anyone else is working in this direction.  Thoughts?