2008 was a very big year for me – I accomplished many things that I am proud of. So, at the end of the year, I felt it was particularly important to revisit the ups and downs of ’08, beyond just the traditional yearly roundup list that I’ve done since 2006.

Last year around this time, I discovered Nicholas Felton’s Personal Annual Report. In it, and I’m not quite sure how, he detailed the restaurants he’d eaten at, how many pages he had read, how many movies he had seen, and onwards. I’ve always been quite interested in data visualization, so I naturally had a feast on this report done by Felton, a graphic designer. His work inspired me to do some data collection in my own life, which I will be much more in depth with for 2009, with information such as sleep lengths, daily morale, daily health, daily steps, etc.

Although I haven’t been tracking such stuff until recently, I did, however, have a number of semi-automated data collection streams running through most of the year. I decided to collect it all up and have displayed this data in various visual formats that I found interesting. It is all pieced together in The Hillsdon Report for 2008.

In it I track:

• Computer usage
• Web history
• Blogging stats
• Facebook status updates
• Travel stats
• Music stats
• Movie stats
• Bookmarks
• Video stats
• Photo stats
• RSS stats

So, if you are compelled, do check it out. You can download it from this link.

The Hillsdon Report 2008