Media Perspective: Using data capture tools to exercise the public's imagination.

Whenever my dad fills his car with petrol, he notes down the mileage so he can monitor its performance. He's an engineer, it's just what he does.

But many of us have similar tendencies and collecting data is like collecting anything else; once you amass a certain amount, you're reluctant to give it up. If you stopped, you would be 'wasting metadata'.

I've always thought that businesses and brands should be helping us with these tendencies, they should be doing interesting things with what they know about us. Perfect examples of this have just been launched by the travel and community site dopplr.com.

We could all learn from its approach. Dopplr lets you share your travel plans with friends and colleagues, it highlights coincidences, telling you when people you know are going to be in the same place as you. This is a good and useful thing, but perhaps not that exciting.

What it then does that's clever is to take the information that it has captured and make it into other things you might find useful.

For instance, since the website knows where you have been, it can create a permanent archive of your trips, and if you want, can integrate this with a photosharing sight such as flickr. It makes for the perfect aid to filling in an expense report.

Look at a trip on dopplr and it will tell you where you were, who else was there, and show ...