Mycrocosm
Judith Donath and Yannick Assogba
The rise in popularity of the Weblog, and the development of its many variants such as photoblogs, vlogs, moblogs, and tumblelogs, demonstrate that people are increasingly willing to share what they are doing, seeing, and thinking. Micro-blogging has opened this space up even further to those who would not at all consider themselves authors; services like Twitter and the status updates common to social networking sites open up a form of publication that is well suited to this wide and fundamentally amateur audience. Mycrocosm is a Web service that uses the visual language of statistics to share even smaller chunks of personal information—individual numbers and words that are full of meaning in our lives—and allows users to track a wide variety of the minutiae of their daily lives to build up a rich online picture of the tiny things they find meaningful.