What do I watch on TV?

This started life as a Christmas project in December 2009.

The inspiration came from last.fm, which I have been using for nearly three years now.

The idea of last.fm is that a background service captures (or "scrobbles") the music that I listen to - not only at home, but in the car (with a background service that runs on the mp3 player on my phone) and in the office (with the background service installed on my work computer).

As a result, I have amassed a large record of the music I've listened to over the last three years.

I do this for a few reasons:

1. The data is made available to me through a rich API, which means I'm free to play with it, as well as take advantage of the creations of others, such as the wonderful lastgraph
2. I can see what my friends listen to, which is interesting, as well as a good way to come across new music
3. last.fm use this detailed history of my music-listening tastes to make automated recommendations of other music that I might like

It's a compelling service, which I want for all the types of media that I consume.

I went looking for an equivalent for the books that I read in August 2008 - when I started using goodreads.

But what about the television that I watch? This is the question which started this project.

I wanted to create:

1. Something that would sit in the background, silently and transparently capturing everything I watch on TV - last.fm works because once set-up, I don't need to do anything to capture my music listening: it just happens. I wanted the same for television.
2. A way to share and visualise my TV watching history. last.fm (and all of the third-party projects that have grown up around it's API) offer a variety of visualisations, and I want even more - real info-porn stuff :-)