Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

Posted by tripwire45 on Jan 27, 2009 12:51 PM EDT
A Million Chimpanzees; By James Pyles 		Mail this story
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Bill Tancer's book first hit me as a strange cross between a voyeur's look at the Internet and Orwell's 1984. I got the distinct impression as he was detailing just what he could learn from tracking our web searches, that "Big Brother" had arrived. That's something of an exaggeration, since all of the personal information is stripped out of Tancer's data (hopefully), but I found it amazing what he said he could learn about people, just by looking at patterns in searches.

Tancer's innate curiosity about people is definitely communicated throughout his writing. It's not that he's interested in specific individuals, but in how people as groups search and what it means. His blog at Hitwise (where he works) can be reached at the URL www.ilovedata.com and I think he means it. I think it's almost like Tancer is "in" love with data, what it can tell him, how it can be manipulated, and so on.

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Is it relevant ... azerthoth 2 978 Jan 27, 2009 4:13 PM

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