Market research using aggregated online behavior and illustrating principles of viral behavior described in Gladwell's _Tipping Point_. Interesting, fun to read, short. Detailed analysis of Tila Tequila as a "superconnector". Inventing your own Claritas PRIZM geodemographic market segmentation could become a fun party game. Am I bohemian mix? money and brains? or (not so) young digerati? It is so myers briggs. ( )

Interesting use of internet search data to learn what people really think and do. ( )

This was an interesting snapshot of the developing data interpretation scene at the end of the '00s, and smoothly written, although some of the conclusions Tancer came to about how drastically our society is changing didn't quite follow from his data and logical leaps. ( )

Like the author, I have to admit that I love data. And this book describes a data-miner’s dream. The author has information about the searches made and websites visited by 10 million users (!) and has demographic information for about a quarter of them. Throughout the book, the author does a great job explaining the data processing behind his conclusions. He writes in an engaging tone and is clearly excited about his work. But what really kept me interested in this book were the cool connections and conclusions he could draw from people’s online behavior.

Read more here... ( )

Bill Tancer's job involves analyzing patterns of internet use, including website traffic and anonymized search engine requests. Presumably this involves things like helping online businesses better target their advertising, but that's not the really the sort of thing he's focused on here. Mainly, he seems interested in digging into all this data, pointing out trends, trying to figure out why they happen, seeing if he can draw predictions or conclusions from them, and speculating on what it all might mean in psychological or sociological terms.

All of which sounds really fascinating, and Tancer seems to know a lot about this stuff and to be extremely enthused about it. (Indeed, he often seems entirely too enthused about some of it.) I didn't find this book nearly as engaging as I'd hoped, though. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that it's kind of dated. I didn't realize, when I purchased it in 2012, that it was actually published in 2008. On the internet, that's a pretty long time. And although the more general topics he discusses are still relevant enough, the last couple of chapters, about new online trends and the prediction thereof, feel downright creaky, as do the frequent references to MySpace. Also, Tancer isn't exactly the world's liveliest or most polished writer. Mostly his prose is adequate enough, but he doesn't trasfer his excitement over into my excitement very well, and there are one or two places where some of the specifics of what he's talking about are frustratingly unclear.

In terms of the big picture of "why it matters," I don't think there's a lot here that seems terribly profound, although that may be partly because a lot of other people have said a lot of similar things in the years since this book was written. One thing that I did find insightful is the idea that people will ask Google about subjects they won't even talk about with their close friends and family, making a search engine into an odd sort of personal confidante. Which seems fairly obvious once you stop to consider it, but which is nevertheless worth thinking about. Tancer doesn't really explore that notion too much, though, beyond a brief, facile speculation that this intimacy with our computers may be isolating us from other people.

In general, I found the odd little bits of trivia that Tancer has dredged up from his vast seas of data much more interesting than any of this analysis. I may have absolutely no use for the knowledge that Americans are less likely to watch online porn videos on Thanksgiving than on any other day of the year, but I can't help being tickled to know this fact.

(By the way, one thing this book did do is to prompt me to go and look at my own search history over the last couple of months, wondering what it might say about me. Depressingly, it turned out to mostly be a tedious parade of my real and imagined medical issues. I suspect all that says is that I'm getting old and boring.) ( )