I was driving to the gym yesterday and out of the corner of my eye I notice the oil change reminder sticker Jiffy Lube put on my windscreen in February. They wrote down the mileage at 67,949 and I quickly looked down at the odometer and read 70,476 on my ‘99 VW Passat. Is this true? I have driven less than 3,000 miles this year?
Back in October I turned the corner into year three as a self-employed journalist and business owner and I have to say getting to ‘the office’ and traveling to meet colleagues, clients and students has seen dramatic shifts in my commuting habits.
I suspect that most of those 3,000 miles were logged between my house and the airport. Pretty sure I could point my ‘Auto Frau’ towards O’Hare now and she could find her way there without any further effort from me.
I know I have been flying a lot this year and friends and family often ask me how many miles I have travelled and until today I would tell them, honestly, that I did not know. But now that I am using free web services and social networks to keep track of my work trips, I can count the air miles in real time and publish reports of recent projects to my blogs and Facebook profile.
Plotting 40 trips on four continents
I just entered all of my flights into flightmemory and can see patterns and breakouts that I was not aware of. Plus it plots all the routes on two cool maps.
Details of a year’s flights on flightmemory.com reveals that I traveled 91,644 miles in the air this year to train journalists in visual editing and digital journalism techniques.
Flight memory added up the routes and tells me that I spent 183 hours and 52 minutes in the air this year. And, on its face that sounds like a lot, but truthfully that is only seven and two-thirds days. When I used to commute to the Sun-Times, for example, ‘Auto Frau’ and I used to spend almost 600 hours together every year.
Dopplr, Plazes, Flickr and Facebook
Adding widgets on Facebook allows me to keep track of my scheduled trips, publish reports of recent projects and count the air miles.
I enter my trip information on Dopplr, Plazes and flightmemory and everything stays up to date.
Mashups are the future for these services. On Dopplr - I added my Flickr account to my profile and it automatically matched up the photos I posted during each trip. Cool. Effortless!
But more effort is needed, frankly. I think soon we will see some mashups that will let you enter your trip info just one of these services and then it will cross post it to all the other services and then sync it to my iCal. Hmm.
Kind of Like if you like to listen to Pandora but also want to scroble the song titles to your profile at last.fm.
If you want to do that - then you use this clever mashup
Currently I use Dopplr to signal where I will be and Plazes to show where I have been.
Hint: Click on the orange ‘Show recent’ link below to play the Flash animation.
If Dopplr gave me an output widget like this - I would probably be done with Plazes. But Dopplr really only lets you publish your future travel plans.
Cool - and how would you use that in your newsroom? Let’s just say that you don’t have to know any Flash at all to plot the reports from your travel writer. That’s power and a smart use of Flash for online stories.
If I don’t find a mashup for Dopplr and Plazes soon - I may have to budget to see if I can hire Adrian Holovaty to write a Python app to simplify entering this structured data . . . We’ll keep you posted.
Speaking of which, no sooner did I post the screen grab of my travel schedule to Flickr than Professor Michael Stoll in Germany commented “.. ok, you’re coming to berlin. will you be in munich as well?”
See? That’s the power of social networking and posting small bits of structured data and connecting them to your digital life in smart ways. Maybe for me now - the chance to visit Munich!
Keep it safe in the new year - I sure hope to see you soon. Either in person or on one of our shared networks I am looking forward to exchanging new knowledge.
