I’ve recently finished reading Clay Shirky's excellent book ‘Here Comes Everybody’. Even if you are knee deep in this field, it is still worth the read due to the quality of the writing and thoughtful structure. Essentially, Shirky says: certain web technologies have lowered the cost of organizing groups and these newly enabled communities, and the infrastructure that supports them, can change the world in ways both new and old.
Much of the revolutionary speak around the current technologies and applications found on the web focuses on the network: what happens when we can create and organize in networks that focus on our electronic identities. But is there a revolutionary line around our ability to aggregate all of the data that these networks and these technologies create?
To answer this question, we must recognize what is different about this data, how it is created and where it exists. How are weblogs different from the pre-social web? A description of these differences will include people (not documents) being the centre; non-html publication and distribution; the intentionally subjective nature of the content; the temporal qualities of the content; etc.
While I don’t yet have a thorough statement describing the data miners revolution due to the growth of social data, I do believe that a big part of it is the fact that we can create analytics that mirror intentional statements in the networked world. For example, digg is an intentional site where contributors digg or bury online objects. Something similar can be done via counting links found in any type of social media. Another example is in the area of market or product research. The intentional model is to directly ask people questions about brands, products, etc. With a large enough data set, we can turn the opinions found in social media into an unintentional focus group.