Look Down The Nose

I think most people would admit that we don't really know what to do with social networking, just yet. I mean, people have figured out how to use the devices personally, but using the business models behind them and their advertising potential is still in the learning stage. One ex-hacker seems recently suggested some fun ideas to stir up the conversation.

His name is Virgil Griffith, and he's a PhD student at Caltech. Griffith is really into data-mining on a a massive scale. He's devised a project where he compares the books listed as 'Favourites' on a user's Facebook page with the average SAT entrance score to the University they are currently attending (so, obviously, this is limited to the US). Based on which books score the most hits in schools with lower/higher standards he has created a graph entitled, Books That Make You Dumb.

Not a great endorsement for Alice Walker's The Color Purple or S.E. Hinton's The Oustiders. They are both pretty standard reading for middle school/early high school English classrooms, but I suppose if you're tastes stopped developing then...... well, its hard to prescribe much value to the graph. There are the issues of correlation does not mean causation and the fact that book taste may not indicate intelligence per se. But, of course, that is not the point. It is meant to be a conversation starter. This is Griffith's way of getting people to think about the different ways researchers/marketers/whoever can use the massive amounts of data being created by social networking users.

So what do you think? With Amazon releasing a terabyte of public data this week, where is data mining headed? And what are we going to be learning about ourselves?