mstem

For my final Participatory News assignment (and because one can never have too many projects), I’m going to try to build this semi-automated grading rubric for shoddy science journalism over the next couple of weeks:

I’m interested in nutrition, and health in general. As a result, I’ve read a lot of really shoddy nutrition and health news over the years. I’ve noticed that the mistakes journalists make usually involve coverage of a single scientific study. For example, correlation is presented as causation, making us all a little dumber. You can see for yourself over at Google News’s Health section, where you can see a variety of takes on the same study results. A study on the mental benefits of expressing one’s feelings inevitably produces the clickbait headline, in one source, that Twitter is better than sex.

What if readers and journalists had a semi-automated grading rubric they could apply to media coverage of medical studies and drug development?

I started looking around, and found that science journalists are concerned with these problems. Veterans like Fiona Fox at the Science Media Centre have even shared some specific red flags for the skeptical observer. I was also fortunate enough to meet with two of our classmates (who also happen to be Knight Science Fellows), Alister Doyle and Helen Shariatmadari, who, in addition to significant personal experience, pointed me to great additional resources:

• Gary Schwitzer’s Health News Review
• Materials from the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships‘ own Medical Science Bootcamp, held in December, 2011

I’ll also be meeting with science writer Hannah Krakauer tomorrow.

I’m pulling out as many “rules” (in the software sense) as I can from these recommendations, and will then attempt to build a semi-automated grading rubric for these types of articles. It’s important to note that there will still be user involvement in producing the score.

I hope to present the results in the spirit of HubSpot‘s Grader.com series of tools for grading website marketing, books, and Twitter authority. The tools themselves vary in utility, but the format of the results embeds an educational layer into the score review (unlike closed-algorithm services like Klout). I am more interested in training journalists and readers to develop a keen eye for the hallmarks of high- or low-quality science reporting than the actual numerical score on a given article. By asking for readers’ involvement in scoring an article, I might be able to augment the automatic grading with human input, but also help teach critical thinking skills.

Down the road, it’d be interesting to incorporate other journalism tools. rbutr integration could allow us to pull from and contribute to crowdsourced rebuttals of misinformation, while Churnalism would let us scan the articles for unhealthy amounts of press release.

New Scientist andEngadget covered our LazyTruth side project today! So we spent tonight trying to get OpenID working so you can install the app yourself. Thanks to Justin and Stefan for bringing this thing to life.

Craig Allen: one of the two writers of the Old Spice campaign, is here to tell us about its origins.

Old Spice Guy himself, Isaiah Mustafa, was supposed to be here but is currently busy using his biceps as a dam to prevent a flood from wiping out a small village, but has recorded a personal message for ROFLcon.

Craig worked at TBWA Chiat/ Day on Skittles, Starburst, Vodka, and other things that are bad for you. So he went to Wieden+Kennedy to work on Nike and Old Spice and drink free Coke. They have a terrifying collection of former Old Spice props.

The original storyboards show a white guy on horseback, before they casted Isaiah. There was a lot of debate about whether Old Spice Guy should have a girlfriend, and if so, should he have multiple girlfriends. Wieden+Kennedy disagreed with Procter and Gamble on this matter.

Craig has predicted our questions for us and prepared answers in advance.

Isaiah is currently single.

Also, they nearly killed him on every shoot. The studio bathroom is very heavy, and was built on top of a boat, and collapsed during one shoot, which fortunately, occurred before Isaiah was famous.

The first commercial required 63 takes over 3 days. Fortunately, Isaiah is flawless, which is good, because everything else that could go wrong did go wrong.

Like the rest of us, creative types at Wieden+Kennedy spend 99% of their day in pointless meetings. In his little concepting time, Craig plays around online at ESPN and celebrity sites. He says concepting is pretty depressing act of sitting in a room fighting over ideas and generally hating each other.

The perks of having come up with such a successful campaign are many: Craig gets to travel to cool places, ride rollercoasters, and get away with stranger ad campaigns. They got Grover to model in a spot, Smell Like a Monster.

He also got to ride motorcycles with Fabio. Fabio owns a LOT of motorcycles.

On the downside, they shoot spots over Christmas. “The only people making money off this are Procter & Gamble and Isaiah.

No, you can’t intentionally make something viral.

Isaiah Mustafa Skypes in!

Client approval on the live responses: The client wasn’t exactly thrilled about not having approval of the web videos before they went live. They gave a few simple rules: no dead animal jokes, no sex jokes. Then they’d call after watching a video that had gone live, because they were watching along at the same time as the public, and they’d say, “Hey, about that dead animal joke…that was very clearly prohibited.” And we’d say we had to run.

Is it Isaiah’s charm, or the script?
Isaiah: It’s all your writing, wordfather.
Craig: If I read the same script, no one would laugh. So let’s split it 50-50.

Has this changed Hollywood’s perception of you?
Isaiah, laughing: Well, there was no perception before, so it’s been positive for my career.

When’s the next commercial?
Craig: I legally can’t say.

We applaud Craig’s weird and extensive portfolio of Skittles commercials, including the one where the old man gets milked. “That one didn’t run as much.”

Can you turn these commercial characters into full-blown franchises? I’d like to see the Old Spice Guy team up with the Most Interesting Man in the World and explore the globe.
Apparently the Most Interesting Man in the World is super old, kind of a perv, and lives on a boat in Marina Del Ray.

Craig: People don’t mind being sold to if you’re truly entertaining them. That Jennifer Aniston thing that came out where she just drank water.

Did you actually sell more Old Spice to women?
Yes. I was astounded at the research. Apparently, we, as gentlemen, don’t buy our own body products. Especially when you’re married, your wife goes to the store, she smells the things, and she informs you how you’ll be swelling.

What scent do you wear?
Craig is a Denali man. Isaiah has to wear it or an alarm goes off. He has every flavor known to man.

What are the conceptual differences in copy written for men vs. women?
Women like to be complimented and told all of their finer qualities that we forget all too often. But guys wouldn’t watch that. So we disguised that in manly talk and jokes to get past guys’ radar. Isaiah is what women want their man to be, and men are happy to have him do it for them.

Things get personal and someone asks if Isaiah knows Craig’s wife (who’s fair game because we saw her sign into Skype). Craig tells the story of his wife having their baby while they were filming together.

What computer were you using in the Mantoclaus commercials?
It was like a box with orange buttons on it.

What are your favorite internet memes, beside yourself?
“I hide my wife and I hide my kids.”
[He's singing tonight at 7!]

Has a celebrity ever freaked out when meeting Isaiah?
It happened this one night where I got invited to an Oscar party by Madonna and Demi Moore, because I did a PSA for Ashton Kutcher. I show up not knowing anybody. Chris Evans, Captain America comes up to me, and he’s cool enough to let me tag along with him for a while. So I just start walking up to people. I walk up to Forrest Whittaker and introduce myself. He looks at me kind of strange, so I go, “I do those Old Spice commercials,” and he goes, “WHOA!” and they recount the action. I go over to Josh Groban and tell him I used his dad’s voice a little for the character, and he’s equally astounded. So I feel really good about myself, start to walk outside, and this guy goes, “Young man, come here.” I turn around, and it’s Tom Hanks. I could have died right then.

Do you feel as if being a black man as the face of a large American brand has impacted the world of advertising?
Maybe a little. People are people nowadays. Terry Crews literally kicked the door down for me.

We ask him to say some lines in character. The crowd demands his shirt off. He checks with the Princess Leia cardboard cutout behind him, she approves, the shirt comes off. He recites the original spot’s monologue without blinking. Raucous applause follows.

(Or, A peak into the psyche of one of the most negative fan bases in the country)

This week’s Participatory News assignment is to report on breaking news via citizen media. Since I couldn’t be in Toronto for tonight’s Red Sox game, I decided to see if I could follow along via Twitter. This report was written entirely from the #redsox and #jays hashtags on Twitter, with occasional glances at theScore’s liveblog. I covered the event from the perspective of fans watching the game live and on TV, rather than relying on direct coverage like MLB.tv, TV, or radio. Almost, if not all, of the information here was attained by following social media. I censored most of the bad stuff, but the tweets below contain some sports fan humor. More Photos

The Next Web pulled together snippets of the press releases tech companies share when laying off thousands of employees. I removed the specific company names (to focus on common language) and created a quick word cloud:

Not surprisingly, the not-great news of “our business has to changed at the scale of firing thousands of people who were once necessary” is frequently spun into “we’re pro-actively realigning our business to be even better in a modern global industry!” There are so many positive words in here! Perhaps the fired employees could benefit from this strategy, as well, by incorporating some of this language into their resumes. They didn’t get laid off, they aggressively realigned their position in a global market.

Our news class assignment this week was to Google-stalk, and then interview, a classmate. I got to know Eugene Wu.

I’m taking Ethan Zuckerman’s News and Participatory Media course this spring. This being MIT, the class approaches the production and distribution of news as an engineering problem. Look at this syllabus! I wrote my undergraduate thesis on how participatory media has disrupted traditional journalism, and this class is a great excuse to revisit many of the questions I came across in 2006.

Check out my takeaways from a week of tracking my own media diet, or just consult the giant bar chart, below.

(my presentation from the Media Lab’s Festival of Learning, where we all taught each other things)

I grew up outside of Boston and, for my first 18 years, learned winter the hard way. We got up at 6am, when it was still dark, and went to school, and when we got home by 6pm, it was dark again. We ran 8-mile workouts during actual blizzards. I got lost once on a course I knew like the back of my hand, because so much snow had fallen that the street’s landscape had been completely altered. This taught me an important lesson: your eyebrows can actually freeze. So much snow can attach to your face as to actually freeze to it.

The first few months are OK. Winter pairs nicely with Christmas and New Year’s, and it’s nice to see the year wind down and watch trees die and stuff. But the novelty fades, and the festivity gives way to another four months of straight winter. The darkness continues to surround you, and, in Boston, at least, freshly falling snowflakes give way to a curbside permafrost of dirt, sand, and ice.

My little brother had an epiphany one day, while shoveling heavy, wet snow off our driveway for the hundredth time. The thought struck him: wait, why are we doing this? Hasn’t man evolved to the point that we don’t actually need to choose to live in climates where this happens to us? Don’t we have planes, and relative mobility to start careers and families in places where the clouds don’t hate us?

And of course, the answer is yes, but Hawaii’s schools aren’t as good.

So, given that we’re here, let’s go through some survival strategies. Some combination of these will improve your bleak days and desperate nights. I’ve broken these tips into four categories, whose powers combined, can keep you happy: Light, moisture, warmth, and sanity.

I. LIGHT

Keep a Daylight-Oriented Schedule
I laughed, and then cried a little, when multiple consecutive speakers at MIT’s graduate student orientation implored us, for our own happiness, to maintain daylight-oriented schedules. As a biological night owl, I find this difficult sometimes. But when it gets dark out at 3:30pm, it’s really easy to sleep through the only hours the sun was actually out for. Right before New Year’s Eve, I was stuck in a cycle of working until 5am and sleeping until 2pm. Over the course of three or four days, I saw the sun for only a couple of hours. This has obvious implications for vitamin D levels (and general sanity). You don’t want to feel like you’re living in Bladerunner.

If you search Google for your ZIP code plus the word ‘sunrise,’ you’ll get tomorrow’s sunrise time. I recommend brute force here. Just keep setting your alarm clock for that time until you can wake up within a couple hours of it.

Get a Sunrise Alarm Clock. Yes, it looks hokey, but if you don’t have a window facing East, or any window at all, this thing is a lifesaver. I got it when I lived in an English basement apartment (realtor speak for a windowless deathtrap). The gradually increasing amount of daylight changed mornings immediately, so they no longer felt like someone had poured a bag of rice on my head at 4am.

In fact, use bright lights in general during daylight hours. Intense light is still the best known treatment for Seasonal Affective Disorder. You don’t’ have to pay a ton of money for fancy lights. The magic number is 10,000 lumens. A lightbox this bright helps over 50% of people who use it. Check out the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University for more information.

Actually, just put lights everywhere. Pick up warm lamps of all kinds. My Dad’s annual Random Christmas Gift this year was a glowing orange ionic salt lamp from the Museum of Science gift shop. Use rope light and holiday lights under desks and beds and other hidden places to give a nice ambient glow, without a tacky string of plastic visible. Pick up some candles and try not to burn your house down.

II. MOISTURE
When it’s not hailing down on you from an angry God, moisture can be your friend in the winter months. You’re going to get sick, probably multiple times, with some stupid cold or flu, and your membranes are going to hate the dry air.

Shower Reliever Effervescent Vapor Tablets
I have no idea if these actually do anything. But when the best part of your day is a scalding hot shower, these make that shower smell like eucalyptus.

Air gets crazy dry, inside and outside, in winter. Noses bleed, nails crack, skin flakes. Plug in a Humidifier, and clean it frequently. Or, for way less work, get a bunch of plants. Their respiration will keep your room more humid, and suck up some of the indoor toxins you’re spending all winter bathing in.

Stock up on chapstick. Chapped lips are the worst. Even if you don’t care about chapped lips, the person kissing you might.

Take hot showers, but go easy on the shampoo and other drying soaps. You need that oil.

Cocoa butter: It’s like moisturizer, but thicker, and smells like chocolate.

III. WARMTH
Now, you probably have heat in your home and workplace, and for that, you’re extraordinarily lucky in the grand scheme of human history. But there are lots of other ways to be warm on crappy days like today.

Wicked Good Slippers from LL Bean. LL Bean is an outdoor clothing company based in Maine. Maine knows winter. They also have lifetime guarantees and wicked good slippers, AKA moccassins. I’ve had my pair for over ten years, and despite being soft and comfortable, they haven’t worn out at all.

Good flannel sheets. You think your bed is warm, but you don’t know warm until you get these.

Boots you like make crappy weather something to look forward to. Some friends and I started noticing that, on rainy days such as today, the women among us were wearing fun, colorful boots, and smiles. They’d even remark that they were excited on rainy days, because it meant they could put on their big pink or yellow boots. Do yourself a favor and buy yourself a nice pair of boots that you actually look forward to wearing.

Guys, check out Tretorn. Ladies, a tip from Kate: You can get warm liners to go in your rubber boots.

I wish I was kidding. For the longest time, I didn’t know that real companies outside of Acme Supply, Inc. sold these man-boy suits. But it turns out that having a pair of long johns on under your jeans drastically improves being outside and being in a cold office. Plus, you can get a full red Union suit that doubles as a holiday party outfit.

Winter biking tips from Pablo, myself, and others (although I usually just avoid it in the winter, rather than ruin my bike with road salt):
You can pick up liquid coating to de-fog your biking glasses. A balaclava is well worth it. You can outfit your bike with snow tires, or any wider tires.

Coffee pot, with timer. If you’re not a morning person, it can be a lot of fun to take care of certain morning tasks the night before, and then let the robots execute the tasks in the AM. This tip shows up in a lot of “become a morning person” lists, because, the theory goes, if you smell the coffee and know the coffeepot is on, you won’t stay in bed. I’ve proven that theory wrong several times, so be sure your coffeepot also has automatic shut-off.

Drink tea, in general. Coffee’s probably what you need in the morning, but you should stop drinking it for those 8-10 hours of darkness before actual bedtime arrives (lest you ruin your Daylight-Oriented Schedule). Splurge on a few different boxes of tea. At ~10 cents a serving, you can fill many a cup of delicious warmth.

Celestial Seasonings’s Bengal Spice tea is particularly warming. The cinnamon, ginger, and cloves will warm you on so many levels. And it tastes sweet, like there’s already sugar in it.

IV. SANITY

If you haven’t noticed yet, you’re going to be inside a lot. Double down on friends. Drop the silly resolution and go to a bar and have some beers. Call someone on a telephone – they’re probably as in need of a fun conversation as you are. You might be independent in the summertime, but you need to find alternative sources of joy in the bleaker months.

Here are four mental strategies to get through winter. You can combine these as you like.

This is the kind of tip you’ll find on eHow.

Find at least one winter activity you enjoy, and that’s really best done in winter, whether it’s curling or drinking hot cocoa by the gallon. My friend looks forward to winter because she loves skiing, and skiing is an expensive enough hobby without having to fly to where the snow is.

My mother claims to love winter in New England, because it gives you every excuse you need to stay inside, cook a big meal, and be cozy. You can read the newspaper guilt-free, knowing that it’s absolutely awful outside and that there’s nowhere better to be than where you are right now. Winter kills Fear of Missing Out.

The more fun way to go is straight denial. Stock up on frozen mangos, coconut milk, and other tropical fruit to get your vitamins, and remind your taste buds that there are places in the world that aren’t dead. Yes, it breaks your localavore diet. But no, you’re not a Pilgrim, and you don’t really need to eat nothing but root vegetables for 6 months a year.

Make some tiki drinks and put a movie like Endless Summer on a projector or large TV screen.

The more likely strategy, for this MIT crowd, is to understand that while you’re more miserable than people in warmer climates, you also have no excuse to get a lot of great work done.

One benefit of staying inside is that genius goes uninterrupted, and almost-genius doesn’t have rooftop happy hours calling it away. It’s the one time of year when the warm glow of your LCD is preferable to being outside. Hunker down these next few months and go at it with all you’ve got until spring relieves you of your duties.

Lastly, we’re past the darkest day of the year, and a final great method for staying sane is to take joy in every little sign of spring you see emerging.

As of last Friday, this was the number of days remaining until the Vernal Equinox, that wonderful first day of Spring. It’s even less now!

You might notice that this is half of our previous number. Do you know what’s in 23 days?

This is the number of days until pitchers and catchers report. You know that New Englanders love the Red Sox. What you may not know is that part of this obsession with the Red Sox over the winter months, this hope, this faith, is based not in a love for the sport of baseball, which is admittedly, the slowest American sport, but because it is gone in winter, like other pleasures, and like the green grass at Fenway itself, it comes peeking back into town with the first blooms.

Pitchers and catchers report is more symbolic than meaningful; we imbued this almost random sports day with all sorts of hope and celebration, not just because we love the Red Sox (we do), but also because it serves as a “halfway to spring” party. It means things are underway, that, in a reasonable amount of time, you’ll be sitting outside in the sun somewhere with your friends and a baseball game on the radio.

This is the number of days until the spring beers come out. ‘ESB’ in this photo stands for Early Spring Beer, and others like Sam Adams’s new Alpine Spring are avaiable now, too.

Photo credits:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan4th/3131548174/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/ohlex/72401592/sizes/z/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrwalter/3207803849/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/f-r-a-n-k/2294809097/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrwalter/3207803361/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkrigsman/4320514763/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/yarianyg/4533588997/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaefros/2806117561/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/kharied/4209460500/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/zesmerelda/4347036728/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dog4aday/3909458813/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/10349297@N00/42385358/sizes/z/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/yearofthegurl/2219565343/sizes/z/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/dalo9999/5059148538/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/8374568@N07/2511890808/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/forsytht/4552015077/sizes/l/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/coincoyote/18848964/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://widbox.com/fireplace-tv
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/airport/17396809/sizes/o/in/photostream/
• http://www.onr.navy.mil/focus/spacesciences/images/observingsky/celestialsphere.jpg
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/kiwanc/464046403/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/birdvoyeur/4295670355/sizes/m/in/photostream/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/wickenden/3285279675/sizes/l/in/photostream/

…where I’m doing most of my blogging these days.

Cross-posted from the Center for Civic Media blog.

The standard US FDA nutrition label is well-known here in the states because it is both consistent (for better or worse) and ubiquitous: you’ll find it on almost all packaged foods, excluding certain foods like fresh meat (until 2012) and fresh baked goods (creating an opening in the market for cupcake detectives).

As we consider the equivalent of a nutritional label for information consumption, I’d like to strike a balance between the consistent, widely-recognized FDA label and the far more creative, dynamic approaches to visualizing information all over the internet.

Our MediaRDI project is underway, and we’ll have two classes of “newstritional” information to display (don’t worry, I won’t use that word again). Our first phase will be to display information about a given news provider, such as the New York Times or CNN. A news consumer such as yourself could see, at a glance, what sort of topics a source provides, and what you might be gaining or missing by reading it exclusively. This could also help professional journalists by visualizing what they’re covering and what they’re missing – they could even advertise their breadth of coverage or depth in a given topic.

Further down the road a bit, we might focus on visualizing the news consumption of actual individuals across their entire media diet. First, we’d have to track media consumption across web, podcasts, TV, newspaper, Twitter, and so on, and then we’d have to parse and visualize it. This phase might be most exciting to the most people, especially if we can make it easier and prettier to display aggregate information consumption.

Visualizing Media by News Provider

One example that immediately jumps to mind is an old favorite, the treemap visualization of Google News (Markos Weskamp went on to bring us Flipboard).

How it’s done:

“Google News automatically groups news [s]tories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.

“Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business.”

This approach is interesting for a couple of reasons. Treemaps are great at visualizing distributions of information in a constrained layout. They also happen to resemble the traditional newspaper column layouts we know and love. Here’s a mockup I did with LabGrab’s treemap of science news:

This visual format could be used to display the categories of news offered by a single source. The name of the news source could remain in the familiar masthead location. We could also add a dynamic slider on the right to allow the user to adjust the timeframe of news coverage represented in the treemap. A user could compare how this news provider’s coverage distributes over the last few years versus the last few weeks.

A great way to visualize the depth and breadth of topics in the news might be stream graphs, like this view of box office returns by the New York Times:

As Nathan says, they look sort of like latte art. Check out Lee Byron’s Streamgraph generator on GitHub.

I’m particularly interested in what happens when you restrict the area of a Streamgraph to something relative, like visualizing 100% of the news in a given paper, creating a Stacked Area Graph. This form allows you to see how one category of data affects another:

If we’re interested in displaying the geographic reach (or lack thereof) of a given news source, it’d be great to be able to show a heatmap of the world, with intensities representing news about those areas. We’re not necessarily able to accurately say which articles cover which geographic areas yet, but I’d enjoy this visual if I were looking to expand my international news consumption (just as the Where I’ve Been Facebook app set off a tidal wave of users visually charting where they’ve traveled and where they’d like to visit).

Heatmap image by igrigorik shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

Another approach to the world map visualization is the telling visual Alisa Miller used in her TED Talk about our news diets:

It makes one think to actually see that, as far as our news diet goes, huge swaths of our planet and fellow humanity don’t even exist to us.

Visualizing News by Personal Consumption

Given that information consumption is an exercise of the mind, first and foremost, it might also be fun and useful to display a treemap in the form of a human brain. I imagine I’d be compelled to change my habits if I could see that a large chunk of my mental intake consisted of iPhone 5 rumors.

Original brain image shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Of course, a pie chart is a simple and great way to display percentages of a whole. Maybe we put it in a stopwatch housing to gently remind the user that the data represents how they’re spending their time, for better or worse.

Original image created by lookang shared under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

One of the most useful personal information tools I use is Mint.com. Sure, they get every detail of my financial data, but I’m not convinced the banks didn’t have this anyway. At least with Mint I, too, get to see what my consumer profile looks like over time. Mint was wise enough to realize that financial information can be pretty boring if left to programs like Quickbooks, and has therefore prioritized visually attractive displays and interfaces. Perhaps that’s why Intuit bought Mint for $170 million.

Mint helps individuals view their personal finances from a number of angles. First, you load all of your financial accounts, including checking, savings, loans, and credit cards. Having everything in one place allows Mint to aggregate every transaction, eliminate duplicates, and provide an at-a-glance overview of your complete financial record.

Replicating this for media consumption would likely require plugins and devices for the myriad ways we consume media, but wouldn’t be impossible. A browser extension and Twitter client could automatically log time spent with various news (like RescueTime), although certain media might require manual logging using a mobile app (like going to see a movie).

Mint also lets users set a monthly budget by spending category. This method could certainly be applied to media consumption. The budgeted categories of media and amount of time allotted to them are entirely up to the individual’s unique goals. Here’s a mockup of what this might look like:

You can also see your spending, by category, on pie and bar graphs:

Things get interesting as you dive into the compare-by-city and compare-by-state features:

Of course, not everyone has the time or inclination to dive in this deeply. For this reason, when you first log in, Mint serves up important alerts based on your activity:

Mint also selects and offers additional financial products depending on your activity. While I don’t need another credit card, I might be interested in a subscription to The Economist if I’m trying to bulk up on my international news diet.

Lastly, as we’re considering personal metrics, we should also look at FitBit and Nike Plus and how they display fitness information. Both services are loved, not only because they track and display your personal metrics, but because they build in motivational tricks that exploit human psychology to encourage healthy habits.

Like Mint, FitBit offers in-depth analytics for true data hounds, but also an at-a-glance display of your personal metrics. In practically every review I’ve read, the FitBit device is lauded for the little blue LED flower.

Sure, FitBit’s sensors capture all sorts of data that can later be uploaded to and analyzed with their web service, but the immediate payoff for wearing the thing is a Tamagotchi-style flower that thrives or withers based on how much you move or sit. I’d be willing to bet that concerns for the flower’s health motivate more people than the number on a chart of a web service.

Nike Plus’s primary motivational force is peer pressure. At first, the promotional video offers “an endless parade of information” about you and your runs, and the service does offer maps, metrics, and exercise plans. But sports are competitive, and Nike Plus rightly focuses on the social element. You can directly challenge (or cheer on) friends who also use Nike Plus, not to mention brag on Facebook and Twitter.

Do you have more ideas on how to best display the numbers behind our news? Let us know in the comments, if you would. The nice thing about the MediaRDI project is that this data will be open, so designers far more talented than myself could create visually compelling interfaces for exploring our personal information metrics.