so i discovered last.fm a little over three years, and i’ve faithfully (read as: automatically) submitted my listening whims to them (via the awesome scrobblepod). every once in a while i’d check out my last.fm profile to see what the algorithms thought i might like, but i mostly kept streaming them my listening data in hopes that someone would do something truly awesome with it:
frederik seiffert created the brilliant LastHistory which takes your last.fm listening data and gets all scientific with it. the analytical mode plots individual tracks versus when you listened to them (with color coding representing genre), but the real magic is personal mode, where the same graph is supplemented by photos from your iPhoto library as well as events from your iCal calendars. and, if you’re anything like me, you’ve been waiting for someone to statistically graph out your life with respect to what you listen to and where you were (infered by iCal and iPhoto data and metadata).
what fascinates me is that i can look at my LastHistory graph and immediately notice a few big spans where i either wasn’t listening to music via iTunes/iPod/iPhone, or i wasn’t scrobbling that information to the last.fm servers. looking at the iCal data that corresponds to the empty chunk of the graph, i see that, well, august and september was when my laptop got stolen in the middle of moving into this apartment and finishing my first off-broadway design, so that six week gap is pretty understandable. january and february 2008? i was in la jolla working on a show, drove to work in a rental car, and probably didn’t have internet access at the company housing. july 2009: in london with the TEAM and, honestly, not really using my iPod. it’s also interesting to track my sleep habits with this data: when i’m home, i usually fall asleep listening to an album, so that’s pretty well documented here. what’s also evident is when i shift time zones, marked by the moving of the silent band that usually hangs out between 3am-ish and noon-ish.
i find all of this, yes, a little creepy, but also extremely compelling: this is what i want out of my personal data.