I am completely intrigued by the massive amounts of new data that are being captured on the Web and easily manipulated to draw interesting conclusions. While some think about the evolution of Facebook and Twitter as Web 3.0, I think that developing simple, user friendly tools for the analysis of large amounts of data is a more likely direction of the Web.
Amazon Web Services already has started to build up huge publicly available databases for analysts to use. Google search statistics and the development of their mapping applications suggests that Google is moving in the same direction but with a different business model than Amazon. Also, researchers are just beginning to understand the novel ways that search term statistics can be used. Some academics recently published a paper that showed a correlation in upward stock price and the increase in company specific search term queries.
Steve Wozniak, a founder of Apple, is an investor in DeepDyve, which is a search engine but focused on finding less commonly available data and databases. DeepDyve describes itself as follows:
"DeepDyve is jumping into the fray by offering publishers other ways to “repackage” their content that are very easy and inexpensive to implement. Similar to the features at the music sites, DeepDyve’s More Like This technology enables a user to discover related articles. The technology takes the contents from a single article and uses it to reach deep into a publisher’s archives to find additional articles that represent a more complete offering of the publisher’s work on the topic. Publishers benefit when more of the right content is presented to a prospective customer. More Like This can also be used across whole collections of journals, and often enables users to discover otherwise hidden relationships between subjects in different disciplines."
Note; Loyal reader @Johnfleming sent me the heads up on DD.
I expect data sets, databases on the web and tools to manipulate data to be popular themes in upcoming posts. As I have mentioned before, Flowing Data is another blog to read if the evolution of data on the Web is of interest.
Now, if I could just find a free database with updated statistics on cellular subscribers by country in Latin America.
