Impressions Scholarcast

As can be seen from a previous post I have been dabbling with an intriguing new Web 2.0 site called Ask500People. While it is in beta each survey is actually limited to 100 people from all over the world. When you go through the free registration you are able to suggest questions. In Digg-like fashion others can elevate your question and you can elevate questions from others. Once a survey is complete the question with the most votes is selected for the next survey.

I put in a couple of questions. According to an email alert one rose to the top at 3 am our time so I missed voting myself. The results of all survey questions are still available. My results were:

The last 7 voters and their city and country are listed on the right and the distribution of votes is shown on a Google map. A full list of votes can be accessed. Also users can comment on each survey and as you see I received 4 comments.

Incredibly the vote was absolutely evenly split so I can’t use it to influence the Queensland govt

For the last couple of weeks I have been running RescueTime on my home desktop. This free app is still in beta and by default monitors the software being used every 5 seconds and reports the results back to RescueTime every 30 seconds. When you connect to your own RescueTime dashboard on the web you are presented with a report of your activity for the chosen week.

The top 10 apps for my first full week are:

Looking at the results it reflects my professional and private activities quite accurately. Outlook, Google (reading blogs with Google Reader), Visual Studio, wfica32 (Citrix connection to Bond), Camtasia (screencasting package) and MSN Messenger refer primarily to my work activities. Windows Media Player (music), Ask500 (survey web site – see later post), and exprwd (Expression Web publisher for my own web sites) relate to personal activities. Looks like I spent about an hour in Explorer doing file management which is about right.

Preparation for a talk on blogging on the Thursday with Peta accounts for the Citrix, Messenger and Camtasia usage. Visual Studio is prominent because I am teaching an ASP.NET subject at present. I am surprised that my blog reading is only about 2 hours a week – I believe this time is very well spent.

Another valuable chart is the daily time spent being active on the machine:

This shows how much time I spent on my machine over a ‘quiet weekend’, and also indicates that the top 10 apps account for only half of my time. The complete list reveals a total combination of 188 applications used and web sites visited (about 10% of this count are different applications). The time spent at each web site is recorded – will this be of use in the future?

I seem to average 4.5 hrs per day on my home machine or 28% of my waking life. Should I be surprised or is this what it means to be part of the Web 2.0 information age?