Data rules the post-information age more so than ever. In fact the current age, the age of conversation or the age of attention, whatever we call it is conceived of data. What are we conversing about? What’s keeping our attention?
Working for a software company, HubSpot, that has marketing analytics as part of it’s main offering I’m a data junkie. It makes the world go round for me as it does for most others in our industry with APIs connecting services and what not. Das zietgeist!
This has led me to think about data and data usage on the internet in 3 different ways.
1. Data Porn: People love stats. I mean look at how crazy everyone is about baseball metrics in the United States. It is insane. And now days everyone is gaga over growth metrics of Facebook and Twitter. At HubSpot we refer to this love for data as data porn – information that gets us very excited.
2. Data Ho’s: The data whores are all the companies that like to share their data with the world. Most major internet companies have APIs so developers and users can access their data and do things with them. Even at HubSpot we collect interesting information from our Grader Tools and give that away through APIs and some we share through reports. We are in a new era of unprecedented free whoring of data and everyone is the better for it!
3. Data Pimps: Lastly we have the data pimps which refers to companies that collect and aggregate other people’s data, slice and dice it and push it through social media. As an example the TwitterGrader tool has analyzed more than 6.5 million twitter profiles, which is essentially Twitter’s data. We put together a semi-annual report called the State of Twittersphere report where we share this data with the world, no charge in this case! Another simpler example is Google – what if not data pimping is the indexing of other people’s web pages and offered up to the world for use in their own relevant, ranked way?
So while we may all be in the vile data porn loving, pimping, whoring age, it has definitely kept us attentive in this age of conversation and educated us in a way the Kama Sutra educated the Hindu masses in the art of loving back in the day!
So what kind of data junkie are you? Can you think of other memes for data? Share your thoughts in the comments or chat with me @prashantkaw on twitter!
