I’ve started to collect data in order to put together lists of my favorite music, movies and books of the decade. And this is the first decade where I have data.

I’ve been a Netflix member for close to 8 years and religiously rate everything I watch. Now thanks to a script I wrote (and has been improved since by others), I can pull the data out of Netflix and analyze. For example, filter the data on all movies where year>1999 and stars=5. There’s my best of the decade, or at least a place for me to start.

I’ve been managing my music in iTunes since 2005, and have been pretty religious about accurate tags and rating tracks. At this point, I can slice up the data with Smart Playlists and scripts in any fashion I like. I have more than 2000 songs from this decade of which about 300 are rated 5-stars. Yeah, I’m liberal with ratings. Also, I like my own collection. So those 300 are where I would start for my list of favorites. Everything from The Marshall Mathers LP to The Hazards of Love. Or from Dhadkan to Delhi-6, for you Bollywood types. In addition to my iTunes playcounts, I have my Last.fm play counts. The Last.fm data is not a complete representation, but it is public.

Here’s a song which will definitely figure in my top 10:

Books are tougher. I haven’t rated or cataloged everything I have read, not even close. And I’ve read many from the library, a few borrowed, a fewer still online. And none of those places have my reading history. The library would keep history if I asked it to, but I asked it not to. And most of the books I read were probably written before 2000, so they wouldn’t be the best of this decade. So I may not have a *list* of my favorites, but a general non-definitive whatever-I-think-of.

*UPDATE*: Of course, I haven’t actually put my list together yet. Coming soon, to a blog near you…