Besides the fact that he's managed to continue and perfect such a daunting project year after year, Felton is also working on some exciting stuff that allows people, who would never otherwise think about how many peppermint oreos are eaten in one year, to chart their own personal journeys through numbers. Felton was recently interviewed about how his work has affected his life, and how he hopes it will change the lives of others.
He describes Daytum, the website he's started, as a glorified spreadsheet. Right now it's on an invite-only basis, but Daytum allows users to input whatever sort of data you could imagine (types of cheese eaten, for example) and get a visual representation of that data in return. Felton's graphic style utilitarian and purposeful. The website has snapshots of other user data that inspires quantitative creativity.
And since the website is private, it loses that public-what am I doing now-Twitteresque appeal. Okay, you can subscribe to other people's RSS feeds, but Felton's idea seems to have ties to the personal and intimate.
Check out more of his work at his personal and studio websites.
And on that same, follow-uppy, personal logging note, Elin Sjursen at Made by Many has, for the past week, made some excellent and compelling posts about the infamous Twitter. I told you last week that I'm not a member of the Twitter community, nor do I understand the reasons why someone would even think of twittering. However, Elin does a fantastic job showing how the media futhers the stereotypes forced on members of these online community and debunking the myths in order to provide us with some insight. She says online communities are not an easy thing to navigate. They are complex entities in their own right and many people use Twitter for a variety of reasons. In other words, they aren't just anti-social nitwits. Perhaps, they're more social than both you and me.
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