7 Email Visualizations for Thunderbird

Now that I have all my old email in one place, my next project will be to create some visualizations to start analyzing it. What do I mean? I’m talking about graphs, charts, tables, heatmaps, grids, networks, etc that illustrate patterns in the email. For example – I have roughly 40,000 emails (closer to 20,000 or so were sent by an actual human, and fewer still were sent only to me – but I don’t know for sure and thats part of the problem). My goal is to have a set of Thunderbird plug ins that will allow me see patterns like these. These are 7 visualizations I think Thunderbird (or Gmail) needs. If I get a lot of interest, I might actually build them so let me know what you think in the comments (no registration needed but I do moderate so it might not show up right away). Continue reading

How to organize your hard drive

This is a problem every one struggles with: what is the best file structure for old files? The problem is actually compounded by the need to do routine back-ups. As I was going through all my old hard drives as part of my email project to upload all my email into Gmail. I took note of the various ways I organized my files over the years, the various folder structures I adopted. My digital life is dominated by projects – personal projects (most half-baked and half-finished), client projects (with thousands of files each with multiple versions), and team projects (like personal projects only with multiple people). Then, like everyone, I have downloaded files (in the form of mp3s, images, videos, and saved web pages), personal photos, and miscellaneous documents.

Here is my strategy… Continue reading

Google more popular than sex (at least according to google)

I was playing with Google Trends yesterday. With a few keystrokes you can satisfy your need for both useless trivia interesting facts and the data to back it up. Where else can you discover that basset hounds are more popular in Hungary, that Hillary Clinton is finally more popular than her husband, or that in spring of 2007, google became more popular than sex:
Here are some more fasinating trends (at least to me). Continue reading