dtunkelang

Yeah, that's at least how I saw it. And I think that message is being lost in the rush to see it as the next Powerset. I know Powerset and NLP generally gets lots of hype, but I think that sort of positioning for them would be a death sentence.

Actually, they're not really about natural language--that's what I'm trying to get across in my post. They're more about a place to store and use structured data and access it formally. That they have an NLP interface right now is, in my mind, a kludge.

And they aren't taking an open source / wisdom of crowd approach. Rather, they are taking a very retro curated data approach, more Britannica than Wikipedia. I'm a huge Wikipedia fan (see my recent post reacting harshly to Nick Carr's calling Wikipedia a "Potemkinpedia"), so my reaction was highly skeptical. But, for objective data like the populations of countries and atomic weights of elements, curated works just fine. In fact, for structured data, I suspect curated is probably the way to go.

Am very curious to hear from others who have seen Wolfram Alpha in action. They did a lot to address my initial skepticism (which was extreme--see my earlier post), but it's no slam dunk by any means.

Jacques, that's one of the stronger points made by those in favor of the motion, and I'm inclined to agree with them. If you nominate yourself for sainthood, you get judged by a higher standard.

I think that Google has done some incredible things that set it apart from other corporations. But they've also done a few things that do reflect abuse or irresponsibility in how they wield their power.

That doesn't make them worse than most large, successful corporations (cf. Microsoft, Wal-Mart). But it does mean they aren't living up to the standard that they set for themselves and to which they invited the world to hold them accountable.

I'm not trained as an economist, but I understand microeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of individuals and macroeconomics to be concerned with the behavior of the economy as a whole. The first 4 of the 10 principles are micro, but the later ones are certainly macro.

This post is part of a series that goes through the ten principles from Mankiw's Brief Principles of Macroeconomics (http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Principles-Macroeconomics-Gregor...) and uses them as a jumping off point to analyze information and attention markets. The last of these do try to apply the notion of inflation to these markets.

All of these folks have a lot of such data, but they're hardly just sitting on it. Amazon uses it to push product; Google uses it to measure and improve both organic results and paid advertising; etc.

It would be great to have broader access to this data, and I believe the privacy concerns can be addressed. But it would be asking a lot of these folks to share what may be their most valuable intellectual property: what they've learned from their users.