blog timeline portrait Prepare a proposal for your final class project. Background and Motivation I would like to explore and expand on the ideas of online portraiture and e-mail history that we have been discussing in these classes and that are described in recent papers. In this context, I have started to examine the rapid growth of blogging and moblogging and their roles as online self-portraits. The use of this combination of diary, personal history and journal has been further motivated by reduction of cost an increased ease of use in mobile and wearable devices (glogging -> cyborglogging) which has further reduced the effort required to post media to an online space. Blog entries are often closely tied to real world events and can be seen as the intersection of social, temporal, spatial and information maps. Developments in backtracking, instant comments have made blogs social information rich. Likewise, some attempts have been made to supplement posts with spatial information (even using gps location on the move). However, apart from the date of each post, little has been done to provide temporal context. Extending Blogs as Portraits As sites that track blog trends such as Blogdex or Daypop highlight the currency of link reviewing and memes form a large part of the focus of many blogs. However, blogs also often take the form of daily narrative, experiences and concerns. Computer difficulties, workload, weekend arrangements, hiccup cures and both online and offline social groups are all examples of typical topics of discussion. People use their blogs as a record of daily activity for friends and strangers. Motivated by this role of growing importance that blogs play in online social network participation, I want to investigate ways for people to display a richer and more continuous net presence. I propose tying online history, composed of temporally located posts and images to personal activity data. Activity Timeline I envisage a timeline of information such as mood, geographical position and activity as a form of identity portrait. Records of habitat and personal rhythms. It can be assumed with reasonable confidence that those who regularly post to a weblog are probably embedded in intricate e-mail habitats. This aspect of a persons habitat then seems like a convenient and informative segment of total environment to begin with. This allows the exploration of the practical aspects and success (usability, etc.) of attaching textual and visual posts to a timeline, as well as issues of balance between privacy and effective portraiture. Programs such as Moodstats have attempted to plot records of personal state, and allow comparisons of this with the mood of the larger community. One of the constraints here is that the cost in time of making daily records of these personal measurements is relatively high and so suffers from reduced resolution/accuracy at times of high activity (when the data is most fine grained). Assessing the greyscales of personal mood can also be challenging and may suffer heavily from the observers paradox. In comparison, parsing e-mail activity from incoming, outgoing and editing strategy records should be easily automated, as should processing this data and updating online visual representation. The cost of maintaining constant online presence becomes trivial, as it is equivalent to simply checking (and grooming) one's e-mail. E-mail Indicates Life Rhythms I hope to address the need for richer and more persistently online presence by using e-mail activity as a visualisable metric of personal and social rhythms, analogous to a pulse or vital signs plot. Secondly, I hope to provide a timeline framework on which temporally relevant posts (in a variety of media) can be fixed. Further to this, I suggest that by connecting a timeline of personal data it is possible to link personal history and archival document retrieval. Navigating past posts then becomes an exploration of personal activity history. I intend to experiment with combining easily collected e-mail statistics into meaningful, rich, subtle timeline visualisations. This includes addressing design questions of scale, metaphors of time progression and whether motion and animation could play any role. I would like to emphasise activity, reciprocity, dialogue and 'floods' of spam in the timeline. Features should be recognisable and comparable between individual timelines. In considering how to implement a blog timeline, I would like to develop a linear plot as an interface. To allow those in the blogging community to implement and experiment with these ideas, my ideal goal  for this project is to also provide a small and visually tuneable version of the timeline that can easily be added to existing pages without redesign. This raises issues of tackling small scales and large data sets, as discussed by Tufte and Fry. I need to minimise 'plotjunk' and maximise 'datapixels'. One possibility for implementation is using the simple programming structure of Proce55ing. Examples of temporally located posts: http://www.hiptop.com/ - moblog portal http://www.yewknee.com/beardcontest/ - personal physical change over time http://www.boxercox.com/jenwear/wearing.html# - physical fashion change http://airlinemeals.net/meals/AllNipponAirways.html - you are what you eat http://kokochi.com/ - example of active moblog http://www.static-kitten.com/photos/webcam.php - work environment http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2780295.stm - personal world news http://www.media-diary.net/24/ - comparing personal styles http://www.treasuremytext.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/TreasureMyText.woa - youth text messages Attempts at spatially locating posts: http://www.blogmapper.com/ http://www.blogchalking.tk/ http://geourl.org/ http://www.reenhead.com/map/metroblogmap.html# http://www.skep.tk/newsquakes/ Existing examples of augmenting blogs with user habitat: http://www.moodstats.com/default.asp http://www.geocities.com/insanitydrops/blogamp/en/ http://www.mymedialist.com/ Bibliography: http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/EmailArchives.draft.pdf http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/papers/authorlines.pdf http://robin.www.media.mit.edu/people/robin/thesis/ http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/VisualConv/VisualConv.HICSS.html http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/architecture.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~fviegas/collections/ http://acg.media.mit.edu/people/fry/