Before I started recording everything I thought I was a very predictable creature of habits. Two snow storms and 12 days later, this is not that clear to me anymore. There are still some evident truths: I spend a LOT of time not only staring at my computer but also typing, gesturing, scribbling, coding, reading,… on it.

• Here is what I did: I recorded all my browser activity during 12 days. I choose to do the media diary like this for several reasons:
• the computer and specifically my browser is where I spend most of my time consuming media
• I use my phone a lot to get notifications but unless I am on the go which was rare those past days, I read and interact with those on my computer
• getting consistent and reliable tracking is possible on the computer
• finally, my browser reflect best what I am doing as I do most things in there anyway (except watching movies and series which I recorded separately, and they amount for a total of 9h30 of movies and 8h40 of TV series)

That’s the why, here is how.

Found a Chrome extension that records some time stats then modified it to get more granular and accurate record to be able to see when a webpage is not only open but I am active on it (reading, scrolling, clicking, typing,…). And then took all of this data and created some nice graphs. You can find all the interactive graphs HERE if you want to play a bit more with the data.

Here is what I found interesting:

• I spend a lot of time on that thing. Keep in mind that all the numbers are time active so when I am interacting with the computer. It doesn’t count all the gaps of attention or loading times. Compared to the 18h10 spent watching movies or series, I find this almost reassuring that I spend three times as much time being active and productive on the computer).

•  I spend most of my time on Facebook or coding. This might be explained by the fact that Facebook is now my primary mean of communication and also that coding is what I do for fun.

• Regarding my news consumption, I got to record what I thought originally: most of my news sources are from social media except the very few news website I visit on a daily basis. I even looked at twitter to get a general sense of news instead of drilling into full articles when the subject was not important enough. If Facebook is opened and active most of the time, many other actions are pretty random during the day, but news reading occurs strictly if there has been some intense activity on my social media walls.

• Finally, I looked at the actual active time to see how productive I was and which websites were captivating most of my attention. The colors speak for themselves, even if I check news websites, I spend more time on Facebook or on my email in those single period. My activity is a lot of multitasking and my attention is very unfocused, on the computer but also with things outside of my computer (I am at most 35% focus on any browser activity at a given time).

 Thank you for taking the time to read until here and once again feel free to play with the graphs HERE.

Media– like food– has become an irreplaceable part of our daily diet. To many people, not being able to scroll through the news, to check Gmail, to check Twitter, to check Facebook for a day or two feels like a real fast. Our hunger for media often parallels our cravings for calories– the later in the night it is, the more we want salty, addictive snacks for mindless consumption.

With this in mind, I spent one week (2/4-2/11) recording what sort of media I was consuming every time I ate. The most repeated results are what I’ve used to put together the infographic above. Because I absolutely adore food and cooking, I actually spend a fair amount of my day not only digesting media and food but also media on food. Food blogs, like Serious Eats and the Kitchn, are my favorite, and I read them daily like newspapers.

The results are telling– I do, in fact, tend to eat “slower” foods with longer forms of media– such as dinner with Netflix, and a Cafe au Lait with the New York Times. Recently, I’ve been working on a project that involves scraping and parsing several media outlets — thus consuming tons of articles and stories without actually reading them. When I code, I tend to eat nothing at all, or salty, repetitive foods such as goldfish to match the rate in which I’m doing things.

It should be noted, that of course, what is shown is an incomplete picture– I tend to eat a lot more of both food and media than shown; what is chosen is curated for the overall summary.

I recorded my media consumption on my computer and cellphone using RescueTime and this is what I get:

Publishers and advertisers are after our attention, but they can’t decide how to measure it. Clicks still hold sway, but recently there has been a focus on “attention minutes” — which, as far as I can tell, is marketing-speak for “time spent” — as a more nuanced and realistic measurement of a reader’s engagement. Champions of attention minutes claim that it is a win for both advertisers and readers, who will have a better idea of impact and incentives for more engaging content.

I’m skeptical because attention minutes still require a click in the first place, and headlines still battle for attention. I’ve been curious about how clicks and minutes compare to one another. If they match up perfectly, what makes attention minutes any different as a success metric? If they don’t match up, do my attention minutes seem like a better representation of my online engagement for the week?

Process

I started by trying to manually collect data on mundane and repetitive digital events like receiving new notifications, opening blank browser tabs, and absentmindedly checking my phone. These turned out to be really hard to record. I found myself changing my habits, and getting distracted by the act of writing it down. Measurement bias was coupled with measurement fatigue, and I would often forget or not have time to write things down.

I opted for more automated tracking methods. For the week of February 8 to February 14, I tracked my clicks using Chrome’s History, and my time spent online (my attention minutes) using RescueTime. In order to limit measurement bias, I avoided looking closely at the data until the end of the week. I didn’t track my phone use, but I tend to use my phone for emails, texts, and games rather than web activities.

Tracking clicks

Chrome stores the last 3 weeks of its history locally in a SQLite database, which made it easy to retrieve my click data for the week, though it took a little query magic to limit it to the week in question.

I hit 4639 webpages over the course of the week, over 650 pages a day. This consisted of 1847 different websites — meaning I went to a single page 2.5 times on average.

I extracted the top-level domain from each visited URL using the tldextract python library, and found that I’d visited pages at 233 different domains. The breakdown of domains was as follows:

Fusion Tables Source

I visited Google more than domains #8-233 combined. The fact that I’m using Chrome’s history and visualizing it on Fusion Tables only drives home the point: for me, half of using the internet = using Google.

But I was also a bit surprised by some of my click data here; five of my top seven most-visited pages were Google pages, and three of them were Google Docs.

I was collaborating on a few projects and papers in Docs this week, but I don’t think I hit these pages hundreds of times. A one-page handout that I prepared for a class was apparently visited 155 times, even though I opened and closed it within an hour. Is Google automatically refreshing these pages, treating them as link visits? This would throw off my results immensely. This also made me think about what counts as a “visit” to Facebook or Twitter. Clicks might work for publishers, but they are less well defined for platforms and applications.

I also noticed a domain simply called “t” that had 40 overall clicks; this turned out to be the “t.co” link-shortening mechanism on Twitter. It was interesting to discover that I’d clicked on 40 Twitter links this week, but I wondered whether it was tracking the final destination too. Does a “visit” include redirects? I’d need to investigate how Chrome stores its history.

Chrome does store detailed metadata about each individual visit (e.g. did you arrive via a link from another page? a bookmark? manually typed into the address box?), so an examination of this data would allow for a glimpse into what Chrome History is storing, as well as offering a deeper dive into my interactions with specific sites. I wonder, for instance, if advertisers should be more interested in sites that users are likely to manually type into an address box, rather than arriving from email or Facebook.

Tracking minutes

I tracked my time for the week using RescueTime. I first threw out any non-internet usage, which turned out to be 47% of my total computing time (primarily Mail, Acrobat, and Evernote). Some of these differences felt arbitrary; I might decide to download a PDF rather than read it on the web, or start a cover letter in Evernote rather than a Google doc, and these decisions would affect hours of my time.

This left me with 31 hours logged online, though it’s safe to say I wasn’t paying attention to my computer this whole time. RescueTime thinks I spent 1 hour browsing “newtab” this week, when in fact I was probably distracted by the real world.

A pie chart felt appropriate as a representation of my attention, with advertisers fighting over slices:

Fusion Tables source

I had to consolidate a number of rows to get data consistent with the click data, but when I did, I found that 7.5 hours — about 25% of my total online time — was on some Google app or another (3:17 on Google Docs). The next three were the New York Times (2:12), Facebook, (1:40), and Twitter (1:14).

The two charts look similar, with some of the same characters and similar breakdowns, but there are a few differences. Attention minutes benefit the New York Times, while Google and MIT fall to a smaller share of the pie. Another interesting data point here is Wired, which only got one click all week, but 55 minutes of my attention (I believe I was lost in some court transcripts in the Dread Pirate Roberts case…a true attention hole). Wired wins out when measuring in this way…possibly more than it should.

My attention minutes look a bit more balanced than my clicks, but it still follows a sort of power-law distribution, with the majority of my time on just a few sites (my top 10 accounted for more than 50% of my total viewing time) and a long tail of sites that I only spent a few seconds on:

Fusion Tables source

I found that the few-seconds sites were the ones I used for quick facts and reference, while I spent more time on sites with full stories and articles. This seems to benefit publishers, but it actually might be a good goal for information and reference sites to reduce time spent on the site.

Combining the two

If we assume that both the click and time data are good and interchangeable (neither of which is necessarily true), then I spend an average of 23.19 seconds on any given website. Publishers like the New York Times and Wired win out when I measure minutes, while libraries and information providers like MIT and Google are more geared towards clicks.

Clicks and minutes both follow power laws, and generally feature similar sites at the top of both. There is a lot of correlation. Time spent may or may not be a slightly more balanced view of my online habits, but it brings its own skews. In the end, the most balanced representation of my week online probably sits somewhere in between these two metrics.

Hello, my name is Stephen, and this is my first post on the MAS.700 blog! I have to admit, usually when I invoke phrases like “the future of news” and “the future of journalism” it’s with a grain (or a fistful) of sarcasm. Nevertheless, I am very excited for this class and look forward to blogging here for the rest of the semester.

For our first assignment, we had to track all of our media consumption for a week and figure out a way to measure and present this information. Makes sense — to understand the future of news, we must first understand the present, most of all ourselves. “Know thyself, and you will know the universe.” Errr, of media. Read on!

Continue reading →

media diaries mas 700

As a journalist, I was interested in learning about the kinds of news media I generally consume: where it’s from, the sources I tend to go to, whether information is pushed to me (via social media or e-newsletters) or I actively seek it out. I used RescueTime and a media log to figure out how and where I was getting my news.

An American Affair

I was surprised to learn that almost all of my top news media sources were American. In fact, US-based news sources far outstripped my media from any other country, with Canada and the UK trailing behind. Mainstream media sources—NPR, the New Yorker, the New York Times—represented the bulk of my media diet. I also spent a lot of time reading about the changes in the media industry these past few days. (General news stories were the main focus, followed by science-related stories, and then media-related stories.)

Push vs. Pull

As well, I found that I spent almost as much time wading through news information that is pushed to me as I do seeking out news.

The Sadness of Endless Scroll

When it comes to news media, I mostly gathered information online (using my computer and my iPhone), though I also got a healthy portion of news through the radio or podcasts. What didn’t make it on to my graph was the vast number of websites I had visited for only minutes or even seconds, according to RescueTime. Of my top news sources, Twitter and Feedly represented a large proportion of the time I spent consuming media, which suggests I was scrolling through stories and reading tweets and snippets of stories instead of diving deep.

The Tyranny of Gmail

Finally, I was distressed by the amount of time I dedicated to Gmail. Nearly seven hours in five days, and two of those days fell on a weekend when I tend to use email less than during weekdays.

Reading books—for classes and pleasure—was my third most popular media activity, after creating content on Microsoft word. This was somewhat comforting, though I am not sure it represents my typical media diet. Since I’m on leave from work at the moment and back at school, my sources of news and the way I use them differ quite a bit from the usual. Still, I would like to offer these media diet resolutions:

1) Cut the Gmail habit.
2) Dedicate more time to reading alternative news sources.
3) Seek out news sources from countries other than the US, UK, and Canada.
4) Spend less time with information that is pushed at me on the endless social media scroll and more time lingering on stories I seek out.

Summary:
While this class approaches media consumption with an open mind, I hold personal opinions about what kind of media I should and should not be consuming in order to achieve my goals. Embarking on the Media Diary for a week allowed me to compare my perceptions of and aspirations for my media consumption with reality. I learned that my gmail consumption far exceeded the time I spent on social media, entertainment, news, and other categories. A focus on effective time management must therefore mean a focus on my gmail use.air max sale

My perceptions:

• I spend too much time on social media sites like Facebook and Linkedin.

• I spend too much time on entertainment sites.

• I don’t spend enough time focusing on my priorities (“urgent” v. “important”).

My aspirations:

• Improve my time management skills to focus more of my media time on my top priority projects.

• Spend less time on media I consider “distracting” like social networks.

Media Diary Goal:

• Understand my media consumption by type and value added, particularly time spent on social media and entertainment sites.

Methodology:

1. Quantitative data: Use RescueTime to analyze browser use.

2: Qualitative data: Based on quantitative results, reflect on value added and how that value correlates with my time management goals.

Results:

• Quantitative data: the RescueTime data showed me that I spend 50% of my online time on gmail communication, another 25% on composition (primarily schoolwork), only 7% on social media, and 18% spread across other categories.

• Qualitative data: Looking at the RescueTime data shows me that if I am to increase my allocation to meaningful media consumption, it should be more effective management of my gmail use. This data was not parsed apart into “productive” and “unproductive” gmail time, so this is a next step for me moving forward.

• Neither entertainment nor news media were significant components of my time over the last week original new balance
  .

Discussion:

Maintaining this media diary was illuminating for me because my preconceived notion was that the time I am spending on social media and entertainment is preventing me from being productive. In fact, since half my media time is spent on gmail, I need to make sure that I am achieving my time management goals within my gmail use. A next step for me is building more effective email habits, such as the “4 Ds” strategy of Do, Delete, Delegate, or Defer. Correlating my gmail use with my time management goals will move me in the right direction towards understanding the value add of the majority of the time I spend on media cheap air jordan.