The idea: an application that tracks how many words I’m reading a day, the semantic meaning of those words, and the quality and originality of the information I’m absorbing.
Combined with a points system for quantifying my activity, I’d be able to track progress on my personal education. In a two-fold manner, this tool would inform me of the topics I’m consuming a lot of while at the same time alerting me to what I’m lacking.
On the same note, the application could track the intellectual material I produce during the day and, using the judgement of my peers, use it as the basis of a metric that illustrates how I absorbed my readings. If it were to look at how I referenced prior readings and writings, it’d be able to assess my retention of a given subject over time.
This might be similar in some ways to Sean Blanda’s abstraction of Foursquare for the New York Times.