Boredness-Index

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BI, or boredness-index is the new buzzword. So, how can we measure this very interesting concept? One scientifically sound way is by the number of Facebook posts made a week. Normally, this value is hard to measure, but as I started copying all my Facebook status messages to my own blog last year, I have easy access to tell my database to pick out these values.

All my statuc updates are posted in the category Status Updates. Using a simple SQL query on my WordPress database (see the layout here), I can find the identifier of that category:

SELECT term_taxonomy_id, name
  FROM wp_term_taxonomy, wp_terms
 WHERE wp_terms.term_id = wp_term_taxonomy.term_id
   AND taxonomy = 'category';

We get, among others:

+------------------+----------------------------------+
| term_taxonomy_id | name                             |
+------------------+----------------------------------+
|                1 | Uncategorized                    |
|               47 | Writings                         |
|               95 | Political Ramblings              |
|              102 | Lectures                         |
|              449 | Pictures                         |
|              173 | Presentations                    |
|              253 | ProM Plug-in                     |
|              361 | Status Updates                   |
|              427 | Diary                            |
...
|              579 | CPN Tools Tutorial               |
|              580 | Tutorials                        |
+------------------+----------------------------------+

Ok, so we’re interested in taxonomy number 361. Now, we just need to extract the post counts per week with this taxonomy. This is done using

  SELECT year(post_date), week(post_date), count(*)
    FROM wp_posts, wp_term_relationships
   WHERE wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id
     AND wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id = 361
GROUP BY year(post_date), week(post_date);

We get something like this:

+-----------------+-----------------+----------+
| year(post_date) | week(post_date) | count(*) |
+-----------------+-----------------+----------+
|            2012 |              41 |       21 |
|            2012 |              42 |       31 |
|            2012 |              43 |       28 |
|            2012 |              44 |       32 |
|            2012 |              45 |       55 |
|            2012 |              46 |       55 |
|            2012 |              47 |       43 |
...

Copy and paste to a spreadsheet and make a nice graph. I color the weeks I’ve been in Russia green, and let my readers draw their own conclusions: