Alexandra Carmichael

May 3, 2010

QS meetup #3 at IDEO

One weekend. One article. 64 blog posts about QS. 10,000 new visitors.

What’s all the buzz about? Quantified Self hit the New York Times Magazine yesterday, in a thoughtful, provocative piece by our own Gary Wolf. The online version includes a heated debate in the comments section. I wonder if it is a general rule that only people with strong opinions take the time to comment?

If you only read 2 of the posts that exploded into the blogosphere, check these out:

– Jamer Hunt at Fast Company. Jamer is a designer and Director of the impressive-sounding graduate program in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons The New School for Design. He points out:

It feels as if we’ve entered a moment when even intensely private
information wants to be free…

The data generated by this micro-physics of the everyday has the
potential to create unprecedented, massive databases available for
projects from a dizzying array of fields. Imagine what researchers
studying disease epidemiology might do with this information, or
anthropologists exploring changing social patterns within the digital
proletariat. It’s likely that these self-organizing databases will
unearth discoveries that were unimaginable before.

– Kevin Kelly at The Technium. Kevin recalls the earliest seeds of QS, at his home studio:

The idea for that first meeting was that anyone who wanted to present
about what they were doing would have 15 minutes to do so. I was shocked
when 20 or so folks showed up. 

I was at that first meeting, and I still remember the pregnant exhilaration, scrappy whiteboarding, and electric buzzing of powerful minds – I had never encountered anything like it before, and I left with my mind thoroughly blown.

So, amazing Quantified Self readers, where are we now, exactly 600 days after that first meetup at Kevin’s house?

4 cities
19 meetups held
39 talks videorecorded
166 QS resources catalogued
190 blog posts
893 QS meetup members (581 in the SF Bay Area, 230 in New York, 73 in Boston, 9 in Sydney Australia)
2,411 referring sites
9,581 monthly visitors
65,400 Google results for “quantifiedself”

Here’s a fun idea to commemorate the first 600 days of QS: anyone who wants to visualize these numbers in an interesting way can have their graphic published on the QS blog. Leave a comment below if you want to join in.

Thanks for being part of our growing data-driven phenomenon!