On the 11th Day of Analytics — Analyze Yourself!

In the previous ten days of analytics we went through the new analytics tools.  Now I know the holidays are usually about sharing and being with others, but on the eleventh day let’s just stop and be selfish for a moment.  What does that mean?  Let’s analyze ourselves!

There has been previous Kate-analysis in other blog posts.  Sean Gorman did a temporal analysis of my tweets in his post GeoCommons and Wonderchook’s Fourth Dimension (a.k.a.) Temporal Fun.  I’ve been collecting my Foursquare Checkins and Geolocated Tweets in GeoCommons for about the past year.  Though it is interesting to see where I’ve traveled by time you can also do analysis to determine other things about your social streams.

One simple analysis is to perform a Filter by Distance on your Twitter feed.  I’m going to filter by distance from Metro stations and see what I say when likely waiting for or getting off the train.  Initially I did a filter by distance of 1000 feet, there were only 78 tweets that close to a DC Metro station (out of 3243 geolocated tweets).  If you look at this it isn’t very surprising most of those tweets are either near the FortiusOne Office or at National Airport.  Other fun filter by distance analysis could be filtering by distance of another Twitter account.

Another is to aggregate your information by another geography for example state or county.  Not surprisingly the county tweeted from most for me was the one I lived in until about 6 months ago.

Self analysis may not tell you very much about yourself in this context, but maybe there is more complex data you can use.  For example with census tracks you can look at other detailed information with regards to your social stream.  What is the age median age of where you are doing the morning versus evening for example?

So remember sometimes it can be okay to be selfish for a bit during this holiday season when you analyze yourself.