Google is Top Tracker of Surfers in Study. (NY Times Bits Blog)
The Obama Administration’s Silence on Privacy. (NY Times Bits Blog)
This UK Sheriff Cites Officials for Serious Statistical Violations. (WSJ The Numbers Guy)
Time will tell, but it appears that Yahoo! has made it *really* easy (for application developers) to extract publicly available data from all over the interwebs and query it through Yahoo!’s servers.
YQL Execute allows you to build tables of data from other sources online, using Javascript as a programming language and run it on Yahoo’s servers, so the infrastructure needs are very small.
Similarly, Google “just launched a new search feature that makes it easy (for you and I) to find and compare public data.”
Image taken from the Google Blog.
Which is pretty exciting as both are huge leaps towards what we’ve envisioned as a “datatrust” in various blog posts and our white paper. Well except for maybe the “trust” part. (Especially given our experiences with Yahoo here and here.)
A few more points to contemplate: