Stephen Wolfram reveals the personal analytics of his life
Stephen Wolfram may now be best known as the creator of Wolfram Alpha, but he's been involved with data in one way or another for decades, and it turns out he's been collecting plenty of data about himself all that time. Now, he's taken things one step further and made some of that data public, offering a detailed analysis on his blog of his daily email and phone use, and even things like steps, keystrokes, and the occurrence of years in the 230,000 odd pages of documents he's scanned. What's perhaps most interesting, though, is that Wolfram only sees this as the beginning of personal analytics. He eventually hopes to be able to ask Wolfram Alpha all sorts of things about his life, with it not only able to "act as an adjunct to my personal memory," he says, "but also to be able to do automatic computational history -- explaining how and why things happened -- and then making projections and predictions." Interested in doing the same thing yourself one day? Better start hanging onto all that data.
