On Sunday, at the Visu­al­ize Your Media Diet learn­ing lab at the Moz­ila Fest­ival ran by Nate Matias, Matt Stem­peck and Dan Schultz from the MIT Media Lab’s Cen­ter for Civic Media, the par­ti­cipants had to draw how would they like to visu­al­ise their media diet, then dis­cuss it.

Here is the sketch I made there on how I would like to visu­al­ise my news diet in order to under­stand not only the time spent with and the fre­quency of use of sev­eral channels/​formats, but also the actual nav­ig­a­tion rela­tion­ships, the way I dis­cover and I engage with the news.

The idea is that you can see on a timeline the fre­quency and dur­a­tion of what sources and types of news items you con­sume, and how they inter­re­late; for example, a tweet leads to an art­icle, then to a Hacker News art­icle, then I come back to the art­icle. Another Hacker News art­icle leads to con­tent cre­ation (com­ment, or share via tweet, etc.), other tweet might get just retweeted, etc.

If I would have other dimen­sions like sources, authors, top­ics, etc. I might be able in time to have an algorithm that mon­itor the usual sources will pre­dict what I might con­sume as news item, and only if I won’t actu­ally find it via the usual way, then notify me “you might have missed this art­icle, you usu­ally read this type of art­icle because…”.