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Reading Addiction

To be honest, I don't know why I'm sharing this with you. I was just poking through my email, and noticed that I read a lot of mail. In fact, my email growth has been exponential over the past 6 years. It's fair to say that I'm addicted. But it's not just email; instant messaging and RSS also occupy my attention a great amount. Maybe I need an intervention. At any event, here are some statistics that may, or may not surprise you:

Email

  • I currently have 54,675 email messages in my Gmail account total.
  • According to GMail, "You are currently using 2177 MB (28%) of your 7532 MB."
  • I have 164 filters sending mail to 111 labels.
  • I have had this account since June 25, 2004.
  • In the first 3 years, I had amassed (sent and received) a total of about 20,000 emails.
  • In the last 3 years, I have since amassed about an additional 35,000 emails.
  • I have 1,879 separate chat logs since Google Talk released and started logging the chats.
  • I'm following 56 people in Buzz.

Instant Messaging

  • I am currently in 26 active IRC channels with Irssi.
  • I am currently connected to 4 separate IRC networks
  • I have been connected to IRC 24/7 since February 25, 2006
  • At one point, I was in 81 IRC channels across 7 separate networks (according to my logs).
  • My IRC logs occupy 239MB of disk space uncompressed.
  • I have sent 6,572 "dents" to microblogging service Identi.ca
  • Of which I am a member of 88 groups (honest coincidence).
  • Further, I'm following 193 accounts.
  • I'm also on Twitter following 124 users and have produced 1,602 "tweets".
  • I have 3 IM accounts: Facebook, Google Talk and a local XMPP instance, each for various reasons, all of which I am connected to 24/7.

RSS

  • Since June 17, 2006 I have read a total of 207,620 items, reading 99%.
  • From my 143 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I read 8,767 items, clicked 106 items, starred 1 items, shared 274 items, and emailed 9 items.
  • My subscriptions are categorized into 34 tags.
  • I share an average of 9.1 items per day.
  • I am following 56 people in Google Reader (synchronized with Google Buzz apparently).

People complain about television saying there's "nothing on". When I'm all caught up with my email, IM and RSS, I feel the same way about the Internet.

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