There are a lot of ways to collect your location, whether it's for journaling and personal reflection or for sharing with others, but it can be tricky making use of your data once it's stored behind company servers. OpenPaths lets you collect your data via iPhone or their just released Android app.

We inhabit a world where data are being collected about us on a massive scale. These data are being stored, analyzed and monetized primarily by corporations; there is limited agency for the people whom the data actually represent. We believe that people who generate data through their own day-to-day activities should have a right to keep a copy of that data. When people have access to their personal data in a useful format all kinds of new things become possible. We can become better consumers: for example, we can know whether a monthly rail pass makes sense for us, or which data-plan would be most economical for our smartphone usage. More importantly, when our personal data is readily accessible and under our control we can become active collaborators in the quest for solutions to important social problems in areas such as public health, genetics or urban planning.

You can easily view your data in the OpenPaths map interface, or download your data as CSV, JSON, or KML, and do what you want. There's also an API. Finally, if you choose to, you can contribute your data for researchers, artists, and techonlogists to create their own projects.

I just installed the mobile app. Looking forward to what happens next.

[OpenPaths]

AntiMap is an open source toolset that lets you record movements with your iPhone or Android phone. Originally developed as a way for snowboarders to record their movements and play the data back like a video game, the toolset was generalized for all outdoor activities.

Simply collect data with your mobile, and then use one of the simple visualizations to see your data or do whatever else you want with it. It's your data. You get latitude, longitude, compass direction, speed, distance, and time, along with an optional input field to mark significant spots.

Here's a demo of the app in action:

With the new year coming up, this could be perfect for those who want to pull a Nicholas Felton.

[AntiMap | Thanks, Trent]

Personal data collection can be a tough sell at times, but with the Nike+, which lets you record your runs, thousands have taken part in measuring their performance and digitally racing with others. For the most recent Nike+ campaign, interactive collective YesYesNo mapped a year's worth of runs from the Nike+ site and invited people to plug in their own runs.

For the launch of the Nike Free Run+ 2 City Pack series, YesYesNo was invited to develop software that would allow runners to create dynamic paintings with their feet using their Nike+ GPS run data. During the two day workshop at Nike headquarters, we invited the participants to record their runs and then using our custom software we imported the metrics from their run, to create visuals based on the speed, consistency and unique style of each person's run.

The video below is a sample of their results:

It kind of makes me want to take up running just so I can play around with my own Nike+ data. Or maybe I'll tie one on to the neighbor's dog and let him loose. That'd be much easier on the knees.

[Nike+ City Runs via @mslima]

My pending thesis is on personal data collection (i.e. quantified self, personal informatics, self-surveillance, or whatever you wanna call it), so there's a special place in my heart for projects with data about an individual, no matter who they are. It's like taking a peek at part of someone's journal that they've decided to make public.

Designer and architecture student Lauren Manning has documented her life for the past two years, and for her thesis project, she visualized a subset of that data — her food consumption in 2010 — with a variety of over 40 graphics. Instead of sticking with a single, optimized view of her data, she stood back and let the data fly to see what would happen.

Here's a simple aggregate view of what Manning ate during 2010. It was a year dominated by chicken and vegetables.

This one uses concentric circles to show consumption over time. The inner most circle is January, and you work your way out. The thicker the circle, the more of that food item that was eaten that month. It looks like she bought a box of veggie burgers from Costco at the beginning of the year.

And finally, all the graphics were placed in a grid layout as shown below. They were arrange from simple to complex on the horizontal and abstract to literal on the vertical.

Obviously a lot of these graphics aren't going to fly in the workplace, but as an abstract self-portrait, this is just fine and dandy.

[Data Visualization/Communication]

FInding himself in a new town, with a new job, Tim Clark started tracking his location on August 24, 2010, and ended 200 days later on March 13, 2011. Every time he stepped out, he turned on his GPS logger, and then would tag that trip with information about what it was for or what happened. Atlas of the Habitual is the result.

Technology allows us to see information in a way we never could before. Atlas of the Habitual is about creating data out of the everyday, the hyper-digitizing of your life.

This atlas is a catalog of my experiences over 200 days. It is a realistic self portrait of my everyday habits and developing routine, piecing together my life action by action, map by map.

While the maps show the travel patterns of a man show most people don't know, it's fascinating in the Feltron Report sort of way.

The most interesting part is the little stories behind the maps. Clack has made 60 maps so far, using simple breakdowns based on time, events, or his tagging. There are for example maps for the weekend, when the Chilean miners were rescued, and when he went on dates.

Here's a map for Unpleasantries:

The times I was the most miserable. Includes the time I got pulled over and received a speeding ticket, saw a dead deer fall off the back of a pickup truck, got frustrated for driving past a hiking trailhead several times, running my car into a snowbank, driving 40 miles on a tire donut because I hit an eight foot ladder in Albany NY, and having to walk my bike because it either broke in some way

Then my favorite: Dirty Underwear.

Laundry is time-consuming and expensive. Total distance on map: 39.80 miles.

[Atlas of the Habitual via infosthetics]

“There’s going to continue to be innovation with new, powerful data around the plumbing of the human body,” [Jason] Jacobs said. “What everyone is starting to realize is that it’s great to collect data, but somebody needs to make sense of all of this data.”

Personal data collection is still a geek activity, but soon it won't be. Either that, or more people will become geeks. It's like, you know, so in vogue right now.

[New York Times via @feltron]

With the success of FitBit and the current wave of self-tracking, it was only a matter of time before something like Basis came out (currently for pre-order). It's the same idea as FitBit, which is a clip that tracks your movement so you can see how much you move and monitor your sleep patterns. However, instead of a clip, Basis is a watch and comes with additional sensors for heart rate, temperature, and galvanic skin response (sweat). Come near your computer and data uploads automatically via bluetooth.

Obviously these new streams of data allow you to interpolate more, in addition to sleep and movement. Temperature readings allow for more accurate estimates for calories burned and the sweat sensor can show something like workout intensity. Then go to your dashboard via computer, iPad, or phone.

It also looks like they're making a push for social and data sharing in the context of friendly competition. This is also something FitBit does, but again, there's more data here. However, at $199, which is twice as much as FitBit, the Basis wristband might be out a lot of people's price range so you might just end up comparing to strangers.

Out of curiosity, does anyone who has a FitBit use the device regularly, and more importantly, found out anything useful about yourself? Would love to hear your experiences.

The list of one-off applications that visualize your digital life, whether it be your Twitter feed, Facebook updates, or Foursquare checkins, has been growing for a short while. Ben Cerveny and Tom Carden, both Stamen Design alumni, aim to take this idea to the next level with Bloom, with elements of game design.

Our mission to bring you a new type of visual discovery experience is already underway. We’re building a series of bite-sized applications that bring the richness of game interactions and the design values of motion graphics to the depth and breadth of social network activity, locative tools, and streaming media services. These new ‘visual instruments’ will help you explore your digital life more fluidly and see patterns and rhythms in the online services you care about.

Bloom is still in development, but the team recently relaunched with a couple of visualizations that you can play around with. The first is Fizz (above), which lets you see your Twitter or Facebook feed develop. The second is Cartagram (below). It displays Instagram photos in a map layout.

About these two instruments, Cerveny notes:

What is important to realize about these, as with all of our coming applications, is that they are the foundations of a constant flow of ongoing iterative development, much like video game franchises.

And it's not just about analysis and technical insights. Some applications will be analytical, yes, but others will be playful or lyrical or a combination of all of the above. Best of all, they're designing with mobile in mind, too, which could really put it over the top.

I've been eagerly waiting to see what these guys have been working on, so it's great to see the first works in action. Now I can't wait to see what comes next.

[Bloom via infosthetics]

Cartographer Andy Woodruff documents all the places he goes, resulting in the pretty map above.

I have collected all my travels within the immediate local area (Boston) into a series of maps categorized by the mode of transportation for each trip. These are not GPS tracks; I remain low-tech and manually record each trip on a map. Any given segment has a line drawn once per day per mode of transportation.

The above map is all of Woodruff's travels for 2010, but he also has the breakdowns by mode of transportation. Here are the maps for bicycle and train, for example:

That's some serious dedication, and an obvious love for what he does. My favorite is the map journal he keeps to document the counties he has visited in his life. Red shows the 2010 gains.

I can't even remember the states I've visited, but seeing this makes me feel like I should pay more attention, if just for the sake of not forgetting things.

[Cartogrammer via @awoodruff]

Zachary Seward for the Wall Street Journal gives some thought to what he does online via applications like Twitter and Foursquare. He notes, "[I just] ended up with this wealth of data."

Lifelogging is often attached to obsessive tickmarking in notebooks and counting things that don't need to be quantified. It keeps getting easier to collect data about yourself though, and in due time, lifelogging will feel so natural, you won't even have to think about it until you're reviewing your very own [insert name here]-tron report.

[Wall Street Journal]