too much information? our unprecendented ability to gather data about everything

In Boing Boing I found this interesting article

Over at Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf's Quantified Self blog ("Tools for knowing your own mind and body") guest blogger Alexandra Carmichael explains how she keeps a record of 40 different things in her life every day, and what she's learned about herself from studying the data.

Daily tracking of 40 things about yourself - Boing Boing - December 15, 2008

Following the comments (I think) led me to a Wall Street Journal article, The New Examined Life (December 8, 2008)

In the first week of January, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton will boil down everything he did in 2008 into charts, graphs, maps and lists. The 2007 edition of his yearly retrospective notes that he received 13 postcards, lost six games of pool and read 4,736 book pages. He tracked every New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin.

Apparently he got so much interest in his professionally-presented yearly results that

they have become so popular that he recently launched a Web site with his friend Ryan Case called Daytum, which helps fellow chroniclers track the details of their own experiences.

(Daytum is currently in request-an-account beta.)

This is just part of a much larger trend, I see it with my friends who mountain bike, they use their cycling computers to gather incredible amounts of data which they then chart in various ways and use as part of their training plans to quite literally do data-based tuning of their own bodies.  Another example of this is the NikePlus site that supports the iPod+Nike running data system.

"Citizen data" also has huge implications for everything from science, through to mapping (for example, the Open Street Map project), and beyond.

I wonder what it may mean for medicine, science, sports, and other fields if we eventually have hundreds of millions of people gathering and sharing detailed information about themselves and their environment.