What My Reading List Says About Me

I’ve written before about Terrell Russell’s notion of contextual authority tagging. Drummond Reed is playing with these ideas with his new startup, connect.me, and LinkedIn recently started doing something similar with its endorsements.

I’ve performed my own mini-experiment to see what would happen if I asked others to describe me, which was self-indulgent but also interesting. On the other hand, I’ve been a bit disappointed by my LinkedIn endorsements, because I don’t feel like they represent me well.

I’m a hard one to nail down. I have lots of different interests, and while they’re all form an integrated whole in my head, that may not be as apparent to others. It got me thinking about whether or not I pay enough attention to my online persona. The answer is probably not, but the real question is whether or not I care enough to do something about it. (Again, the answer is probably not.)

So then I thought about looking at other data about myself to see what I could learn. I decided to check my Evernote tags. I’ve been an avid Evernote user for several years now, and it is my primary tool for clipping interesting articles. I’m also an avid tagger, so I have a pretty good emergent taxonomy to use for analysis.

I decided to look at my most frequent, topical tags. (I have a set of tags that I use for internal organization, which are irrelevant for the purposes of this analysis.) I then created a tag cloud using Wordle. Here were the results:

Evernote Tag Cloud (2012-10-20)

It’s fairly representative of the things that I’m interested in. If I were more consistent about tagging, the “sports” tag would be larger. (I have several articles tagged by specific sports, such as “basketball,” as opposed to the more generic, “sports.”) Same with “entrepreneurship.” (I have a bunch of articles tagged “startup.”) A lot of the “psychology” articles are actually about behavior change.

What do you think? Would you have guessed these about me? Are there any tags that surprise you?

4 replies to “What My Reading List Says About Me”

    1. This is a good impetus for me to consolidate some of my tags. My sports tag would definitely grow, but it will be interesting to see by how much.

    1. That one surprised me too. As much as I pooh pooh social media and try to distance myself from that label, I guess the reality is that there are lots of awesome stories that I found fascinating.

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