The collective history of Web searches, he wrote on his blog in late 2003, was “a place holder for the intentions of humankind — a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends.”
“Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward,” he wrote. It was a nice idea, but for most of us it was just an abstraction. The search companies did offer glimpses into the data with bare-bones (and sanitized) rankings of the most popular search terms, and Yahoo sold more detailed information to advertisers who wanted to do a better job of selling their products online. But there was no way for most people to dig into the data themselves.
Read this article from the New York Times. If it seems familiar, maybe you’ve been reading this blog?
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