PKB

My friends and family know I work in the Internet industry.

Yet I find when I’m home on holiday, explaining why I choose to spend the time blogging, tagging, uploading and otherwise filling my corner of the Web with … um … things I find interesting … falls flat. A lot.

And then I’m back in Mountain View, grokking with fellow travellers both inside Mozilla and out, and it all seems copacetic again. Of course it makes sense to burn hours feeding these reordered bits back into the node swirl.

So tonight as I turned the crank on yet another episode of Bloglines and Me, connections were made across the posts below, and I got a little closer to an answer for the question, “What do you do, exactly?”

• Jeff Veen writes about the new trends feature in Google Reader: “But beyond the visualization, this serves as a good example of collecting and understanding the ambient information that flows through our digital lives… As we move through our connected days, thousands of tiny behaviors can be recorded and analyzed, helping us to better understand who we really are.”

• Jeff was inspired in part by a Tom Coates post on “personal lifestyle gizmos” that is really a deep dive into “capturing and making sense of the activities of … life in an ambient and backgrounded way.”

• To close the circle, and so the headline makes sense, here’s John on why he loves the Nike+iPod combo, which feeds data on your runs to a Web service: “I find that the nike+ipod makes me want to run more, to run faster, to perform better.”

I think the unifying thread to these three notes is a desire for understanding, in turn enabled by the data flow we throw off as we interact with the Web.

The information overlay is something I’ve adapted to over the past several years of engaging online, and colors my real world interactions. Hopefully, this starts to build an explanation on part of what makes the world I work in so fascinating to me.